Sega Download: Genesis Virtual Console Vol. 7

[Melf]

The Wii Virtual Console has been on fire lately, serving up a slew of quality titles. This time around we have perhaps the best selection of titles yet - Gleylancer, Shining Force II, Super Fantasy Zone; these are just some of the great games that Genesis fans can now play on their Wiis. Oh, did you notice that two of the three games mentioned were never released on the American Genesis? Now you can own them without importing! Read about all the goodness in the full article and grab yourself some Wii points.

[sega fan]

Cool, I wish I did know about in advance and buy SF II CE for my review. But Hey, I had that review done in June, PC died in Electric storm, boo hoo . Any way, I enjoyed your article Ken, Nice descriptions and desicions.

[InternalPrimate]

I despise myself for not writing these anymore, but Ken couldn't have picked a better time to write this feature. Shining Force II for $8 makes me want to cry tears of joy.

[matteus]

tut thats not a shining force 2 screen shot!

[Zebbe]

I can play my Gleylancer legally without Virtual Console. Is the VC version in English?

[retrospiel]

Very impressive releases - especially the games that previously were only available as imports. Very nice.

[gaMEthuselah]

Zebbe, no it's not translated... At least not in the game. It's got translations of SOME of the scenes in the manual in the Home menu. The game, at least for Europe, runs in the slower 50 Hz mode as well. The music however, is still playing at "60 Hz-speed", causing you to look at a minute or so of intro and ending in silence.

While I nevertheless still like the game, this reaks of sheer laziness on the part of the emulation team.

gMt - æ

[retrospiel]

The emulation team is M2 at Sega of Japan, but I doubt they are responsible for the crimes of Sega of Europe or Sega of America.

Sega as an international company suffers from one of the worst cases of "not-knowing-what-the-other-hand-does" I have ever seen and they just don't care. In my opinion that's what ruined them (for me). The games they release in Japan could have kept them in business forever, but SOA thought it would be more fun to go down the multi platform route.

That's also why Nintendo are still successful, even though their competitors are Sony and Microsoft. Imagine Nintendo of America wouldn't have agreed with the Wii - or would have changed the controllers for the Western market, like SOA and SOE did with Saturn - and would have done a half-assed job at promotion and then decided to go multi platform instead, releasing the next Zelda exclusively for PS3, and dropping support for Wii after less than 15 months after its release.

[Zebbe]

Zebbe, no it's not translated... At least not in the game. It's got translations of SOME of the scenes in the manual in the Home menu. The game, at least for Europe, runs in the slower 50 Hz mode as well. The music however, is still playing at "60 Hz-speed", causing you to look at a minute or so of intro and ending in silence.

Haha. MIJET took a weekend to fix that problem that occured when the English text became longer and took more time than the Japanese text. People who do stuff for free do it less half-assed than those you get paid...

[RedComet]

The incredible visuals are complimented wonderfully by some incredible visuals, and the level design wraps up this package nice and tightly.

Huh? Was that intentional?

[Melf]

Lol, no. Thanks for pointing that out.

[slip81]

finally my prayers have been answered. I've only been waiting for Shining Force II since they announced the VC would have Genesis games. Now, here's hoping that they add Sega CD games and we get that version, or, even better all three scenarios to part III.

[Melf]

I really doubt you'll be seeing any Saturn games on the Wii until Nintendo gets off its ass and does something about the storage problem. How hard is it to allow us an external USB hard drive? Hell, just patch the Wii to let us load games right off an SD card.

I swear, sometimes the most obvious things are those which Nintendo fucks up the most.

[slip81]

I seem to remember reading a while back on kotaku or something like that that Nintendo was planning on doing something about the storage problem. But the article didn't say what or when.

Though I'm confident they'll do something eventually, as more an more people utilize the DLC features like Wii Ware, and now game like world tour are gonna support DLC, it'll get to the point where even their precious "casual" audience will fill up the memory and grandma isn't gonna understand how, or want to mess with SD cards and transferring files every time she wants to load up Dr. Mario.

[Melf]

I don't know how soon it will be before we see something though. Nintendo's own VP told the press at E3 this year that people should delete old games from memory to make room for new ones:

Well, we just don't have any announcements to make right now on storage, but what I see in my own family is that we buy a heck of a lot of Virtual Console games and WiiWare games. We always want to play what's new and so the way we're handling is we just delete the games we're not playing right now knowing that they're there if we ever want to go back to them, and just focus on the new gameplay.

Source.

Even Reggie has been dancing around the issue.

While Miyamoto says to expect an announcement about hard drive solutions in the future (but doesn't confirm an hard drive), Reggie says Nintendo is not making a hard drive and will come up with a better solution.

Source.

What exactly a "better solution" means is anyone's guess. Please Nintendo, stop trying to reinvent the wheel. Just let us load games off an SD card. No extra peripherals or hardware needed, and it can be done via patch. Why is that so hard?