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Nintendo has to be the most frustrating company when it comes to playing Older titles

SCB3

Member
Now I know the easy answer is to buy the Original Hardware and games, but its 2021 dammit, I want it to be easier and in some cases, looking at you Earthbound!, Cheaper to buy or play digitally.

What brought me to this was the upcoming release of Metroid Dread, I like Metroid but there are a couple of games I've not played or want to replay and looking at my collections I only have access to whats on Switch right now (I miss my collection of Retro, but I had bills to pay :( ) which limits me to Metroid and Super Metroid on Switch or the SNES Classic.

This only leaves me with very few options:

  • Buy a Wii U and play through VC or the Disc version of Prime Trilogy (also a pain as I did own the Digital version of this I'm sure, but the older Nintendo accounts were different)
  • Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion, I do have a 3DS somewhere, and I still have the Cart for Fusion as well as the Digital version on Wii U, then buy the Remake of Samus Returns, a game that was released a year after the Switch's release (and Nintendo wonder why Metroid doesn't sell well)
  • Emulation with Dolphin, admittedly, this could be great option to play at a better framerate and resolution on the Prime Series as well

What is more annoying is Nintendo could easily address this with their NSO or VC stores, but they just don't, take a look at what Xbox do with older franchises such as Halo, I can go back and play every single Halo game on my Brand New Xbox Series X whenever I want before Infinite's release (in fact I did this with the PC version just before Infinite was delayed last year)
 

Impotaku

Member
Hence the reason why i never sold my nintendo stuff at all, have a pristine library of games & hardware to enjoy if i get the urge to play anything plus the famicom & super famicom mini totally eradicated my need to bother with the real hardware for those 2 consoles anymore as i have them set up to play all the stuff i love with pleasingly crisp scanlines ect.

Could totally cash in and make out like a bandit on what some of this stuff now goes for but i love having a physical library of games to play through, they are all from the eras where they got beautiful full colour japanese manuals. It does majorly suck for anyone new to nintendo stuff though as they certainly do seem to like pulling the "disney" vault shit. Still have no clue why they pulled that crap with the mario 3d collection as you can still easily find physical copies at retail price still.
 

Umbasaborne

Banned
Nintendo is truly shit when it comes to making their legacy titles availible. They had a good thing going with the virtual console. Idk they probably werent making money on it, cant imagine any other reason a company would just get rid of a perfectly good system
 

Impotaku

Member
At least in a way Sony allows something of a backwards compatibility program. Nintendo doesn't truly do that.
They did for some consoles but the problem is they jump between media types, building a disk drive on a cart machine & vice versa isn't something they would do. Wii played GC totally fine so did wiiu, ds played pretty much all gba stuff. Gameboy sp played all gb stuff.
 

Raekwon26

Member
Hence the reason why i never sold my nintendo stuff at all, have a pristine library of games & hardware to enjoy if i get the urge to play anything plus the famicom & super famicom mini totally eradicated my need to bother with the real hardware for those 2 consoles anymore as i have them set up to play all the stuff i love with pleasingly crisp scanlines ect.
If only I had that sense back then.

On a Gamecube retro tour right now. It's been a bitch.
 
Homebrew emulation will always be the superior way to play old games.
Long live the homebrew. The only guaranteed way of preserving these properties is through the community because most of the time they are abandoned by their creators, well, until they see there's still interest in those titles and go out of their way to sue the ones who preserved it first when no one cared.
 

Guileless

Temp Banned for Remedial Purposes
Remember thr deal where you bought cards or something and fed them into a peripheral to play NES games on the GBA? Am I remembering that correctly?
 

Impotaku

Member
If only I had that sense back then.

On a Gamecube retro tour right now. It's been a bitch.
Oof gamecube is kind of messed up right now some titles are going mental, that's one of the collections i looked after with the upmost care as i go for japanese nintendo stuff and those cardboard slip cases are so easily damaged. For years i had to be extremely careful when opening them but finally some wonderful person invented protectors for them.
 

Impotaku

Member
Remember thr deal where you bought cards or something and fed them into a peripheral to play NES games on the GBA? Am I remembering that correctly?
You are, it was the e-reader, it let you interface with various gba & gc games to scan cards in to unlock or even add new data like the precursor to dlc. Sort of dlc in physical form, i fucking loved that thing but i'm in the minority lol. The cards were so damn hard to get hold of though, one of my biggest regrets is not trying harder when they were still on sale but even with my friend in japan hunting the hobby shops he barely came away with many i ended up having to resort to yahoo auctions a lot to get hold of them.
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The stuff in those pics would easily set you back 4 figures now, hence me taking the time to properly buy a couple of higher quality binders & a lot of sleeves to protect them all. I can never replace it if that collection got damaged or went missing. The 5 cards in the last pic there's only 1000 in existance.
 
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cireza

Banned
Buy a Wii U
This has been the right answer since the console was released, in 2012.

Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion
You can play Fusion on 3DS ? As far as I know, the game was only given to Ambassadors, and is not available otherwise. And it was blurry anyway, as the 3DS resolution is not a good fit for GBA games. I would not buy a GBA or DS, the screens have aged a lot.
 
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Impotaku

Member
So what's the justification for Virtual Console games?
That's probably why virtual console ended up been created for those times where they didn't want to build the backwards compatability into the hardware they could just emulate instead although to be honest i always found the virtual console a bit shit for playing their stuff. Stupidly dark filters placed on games or the flashing messed with, Even unofficially emulated stuff is WAY better than what nintendo puts out.
 

nowhat

Member
That's probably why virtual console ended up been created for those times where they didn't want to build the backwards compatability into the hardware they could just emulate instead although to be honest i always found the virtual console a bit shit for playing their stuff.
No, I meant why purchases don't carry over to later console generations. There's no technical reason for it, other than $$$ obviously.
 

justiceiro

Marlboro: Other M
Most frustrating? Nah, not even close.

It's just the company that people want play legacy stuff the must.

Try playing every previous monster hunter, or even every previous silent hill.
 
Long live the homebrew. The only guaranteed way of preserving these properties is through the community because most of the time they are abandoned by their creators, well, until they see there's still interest in those titles and go out of their way to sue the ones who preserved it first when no one cared.
Yeah its irritating. I got one of those letters from comcast a few years ago, for downloading a game that is no longer available to buy from 2 decades ago. It was Gran Turismo 1 & 2 to add to my ps classic. I owned the games physically or at least used to. (out of a list of stuff they were concerned about downloading, it was two outdated ps1 games, wtf)... So Nintendo is not the only one guilty of this.

My thoughts are if you aren't going to sell these games anymore , not printing , no digital versions to buy, then it's free reign. Apparently they were worried about me taking away their non potential profit from two $5 ps1 titles.

There really needs to be some game preservation org that pushes for this to be preserved as companies seem to "loose the source code" all too often now days too.
 
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Metroid games had a huge spike in popularity on the Wii U after the announcement.

Nintendo is just doing what any smart business would do. The Wii U had a huge virtual console from all of their past consoles and handhelds. They got the message with its sales. BC just isn't a big selling point, despite what forums would lead you to believe.
 
Yeah its irritating. I got one of those letters from comcast a few years ago, for downloading a game that is no longer available to buy from 2 decades ago. It was Gran Turismo 1 & 2 to add to my ps classic. I owned the games physically or at least used to. (out of a list of stuff they were concerned about downloading, it was two outdated ps1 games, wtf)... So Nintendo is not the only one guilty of this.

My thoughts are if you aren't going to sell these games anymore , not printing , no digital versions to buy, then it's free reign. Apparently they were worried about me taking away their non potential profit from two $5 ps1 titles.

There really needs to be some game preservation org that pushes for this to be preserved as companies seem to "loose the source code" all too often now days too.
Welp, them the hole goes a little deeper. We would need to see what the jurisprudence says about cases likes these. I bet we'd fall on the subject of when does an IP falls into the public domain, even when said IP seems to be "abandoned" by their owners. I not the more versed in said subject since to understand it I'd have to look into international laws, treats, and more. But yeah, Comcast is not in the wrong here, they are just saving their asses out of legal trouble with Sony and Polyphone since you used their services to download it "illegally" (technically speaking is illegal, but there is more like a vacuum in the legal interpretation for a case like this, or similar, with an analogy to something similar being the best case here).

I understand your frustration with it, as I share the same thoughts. But the law is never really intended to be morally fair.
 
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EverydayBeast

thinks Halo Infinite is a new graphical benchmark
Nintendo doesn’t benefit from making it a hard time to play their vintage games. I think the OG PS3 far did it best with backwards compatibility.
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Whatever device you're posting to NeoGAF from, that's the best modern device to play Metroid Fusion on.
 

Arimer

Member
I've always agreed. part of nintendo online is their virtual catalog but they add games so slow and it needs to cover all systems. Even just on first party games alone that would be a massive selling point.
 
Agree with everything that has been said in this thread, Nintendo is terrible with BC and they seemingly don't care about their legacy titles.

However, since the thread is the most frustrating company to play older titles, I'd have to disagree and say that would be Sega. Outside of Genesis collections and the odd Master System/Dream cast port, most of their games have been unplayable for decades. Forget about playing any Saturn titles without putting down hundreds of dollars to buy single games. Saturn is (or was, dunno currently) notoriously hard to emulate so even going the emulation route is not optimal. Nintendo sucks a lot and have gotten worse every Gen since the Wii, but at least we got the opportunity to play something like Earthbound on the Wii U/3DS VC, or they brought over Sin and Punishment to the Wii VC. Anything Master System/Saturn/Dreamcast related have been unplayable on anything but the OG hardware.

But who knows, maybe this will change on a Wednesday in the near future
 

gamer82

Member
it would be nice to be able to play the whole Metroid series since it's been 19 years since the last game and i have been more of a Mario and donkey Kong fan so i missed the Metroid hype .
The switch should be able to play these games , i mean if the 3ds can how hard can it be.

It feel like they are just being shelfish and lazy and wanting to keep stuff because they are lacking on content to put out.

Come on Nintendo give us the goods please . your money is waiting

show me the money GIF
 
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Krappadizzle

Gold Member
We have a variation of this same thread every few weeks it seems. At this point, if you are a fan of Nintendo games, just get a PC. You can accurately emulate and/or play better than original releases on PC. You can also access roughly 95%~ of their entire library and even Switch games are being emulated pretty accurately on day and date of new releases.

Just save yourself the frustration and headache and play their games emulated on PC. This is coming from someone that has a modded Wii U with a ton of emulated systems on it AND a Switch/3DS owner.
 

SCB3

Member
Agree with everything that has been said in this thread, Nintendo is terrible with BC and they seemingly don't care about their legacy titles.

However, since the thread is the most frustrating company to play older titles, I'd have to disagree and say that would be Sega. Outside of Genesis collections and the odd Master System/Dream cast port, most of their games have been unplayable for decades. Forget about playing any Saturn titles without putting down hundreds of dollars to buy single games. Saturn is (or was, dunno currently) notoriously hard to emulate so even going the emulation route is not optimal. Nintendo sucks a lot and have gotten worse every Gen since the Wii, but at least we got the opportunity to play something like Earthbound on the Wii U/3DS VC, or they brought over Sin and Punishment to the Wii VC. Anything Master System/Saturn/Dreamcast related have been unplayable on anything but the OG hardware.

But who knows, maybe this will change on a Wednesday in the near future
I Should've been cleary, I meant console makers, because Square is even worse for older games not being availible
 

Spaceman292

Banned
Now I know the easy answer is to buy the Original Hardware and games, but its 2021 dammit, I want it to be easier and in some cases, looking at you Earthbound!, Cheaper to buy or play digitally.

What brought me to this was the upcoming release of Metroid Dread, I like Metroid but there are a couple of games I've not played or want to replay and looking at my collections I only have access to whats on Switch right now (I miss my collection of Retro, but I had bills to pay :( ) which limits me to Metroid and Super Metroid on Switch or the SNES Classic.

This only leaves me with very few options:

  • Buy a Wii U and play through VC or the Disc version of Prime Trilogy (also a pain as I did own the Digital version of this I'm sure, but the older Nintendo accounts were different)
  • Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion, I do have a 3DS somewhere, and I still have the Cart for Fusion as well as the Digital version on Wii U, then buy the Remake of Samus Returns, a game that was released a year after the Switch's release (and Nintendo wonder why Metroid doesn't sell well)
  • Emulation with Dolphin, admittedly, this could be great option to play at a better framerate and resolution on the Prime Series as well

What is more annoying is Nintendo could easily address this with their NSO or VC stores, but they just don't, take a look at what Xbox do with older franchises such as Halo, I can go back and play every single Halo game on my Brand New Xbox Series X whenever I want before Infinite's release (in fact I did this with the PC version just before Infinite was delayed last year)
Really? Because I find it very easy to play HD versions of old game cube games. And they're all free, too. It's great.
 
I dont get this thread. If you have a Wii U you can play everything aside from Metroid II which can be played on a 3DS.
Yeah, I do have both versions of Metroid II on 3DS. That system also had a lot of interesting BC options.

Nintendo is actually usually pretty good on BC. Physically support the previous gen when possible, and a Virtual Console. This gen they couldn't do either, so its a big downgrade from 3DS and Wii U which both have tons of options.
 

tassletine

Member
Now I know the easy answer is to buy the Original Hardware and games, but its 2021 dammit, I want it to be easier and in some cases, looking at you Earthbound!, Cheaper to buy or play digitally.

What brought me to this was the upcoming release of Metroid Dread, I like Metroid but there are a couple of games I've not played or want to replay and looking at my collections I only have access to whats on Switch right now (I miss my collection of Retro, but I had bills to pay :( ) which limits me to Metroid and Super Metroid on Switch or the SNES Classic.

This only leaves me with very few options:

  • Buy a Wii U and play through VC or the Disc version of Prime Trilogy (also a pain as I did own the Digital version of this I'm sure, but the older Nintendo accounts were different)
  • Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion, I do have a 3DS somewhere, and I still have the Cart for Fusion as well as the Digital version on Wii U, then buy the Remake of Samus Returns, a game that was released a year after the Switch's release (and Nintendo wonder why Metroid doesn't sell well)
  • Emulation with Dolphin, admittedly, this could be great option to play at a better framerate and resolution on the Prime Series as well

What is more annoying is Nintendo could easily address this with their NSO or VC stores, but they just don't, take a look at what Xbox do with older franchises such as Halo, I can go back and play every single Halo game on my Brand New Xbox Series X whenever I want before Infinite's release (in fact I did this with the PC version just before Infinite was delayed last year)
As far as I know your Brand New Xbox Series X can play all of those titles using emulation, or you can just play on PC.
Sucks that you have bills to pay, but also the cash to pay for console just to play Metroid, especially when you have a PC and a Brand New Xbox Series X.

Yeah, Nintendo are really annoying.
 

Shut0wen

Member
Now I know the easy answer is to buy the Original Hardware and games, but its 2021 dammit, I want it to be easier and in some cases, looking at you Earthbound!, Cheaper to buy or play digitally.

What brought me to this was the upcoming release of Metroid Dread, I like Metroid but there are a couple of games I've not played or want to replay and looking at my collections I only have access to whats on Switch right now (I miss my collection of Retro, but I had bills to pay :( ) which limits me to Metroid and Super Metroid on Switch or the SNES Classic.

This only leaves me with very few options:

  • Buy a Wii U and play through VC or the Disc version of Prime Trilogy (also a pain as I did own the Digital version of this I'm sure, but the older Nintendo accounts were different)
  • Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion, I do have a 3DS somewhere, and I still have the Cart for Fusion as well as the Digital version on Wii U, then buy the Remake of Samus Returns, a game that was released a year after the Switch's release (and Nintendo wonder why Metroid doesn't sell well)
  • Emulation with Dolphin, admittedly, this could be great option to play at a better framerate and resolution on the Prime Series as well

What is more annoying is Nintendo could easily address this with their NSO or VC stores, but they just don't, take a look at what Xbox do with older franchises such as Halo, I can go back and play every single Halo game on my Brand New Xbox Series X whenever I want before Infinite's release (in fact I did this with the PC version just before Infinite was delayed last year)
Doesnt switch online not have the original metroid trilogy on there? I know it has super metroid not sure about the others, you can get a wii u for dirt cheap and there VC games are actually quite cheap, im sure metroid is £3 for each game but yeah i agree it does suck, i mean nintendo let you replay all thebgamecube games on wii then wii u it was limited to just wii games even when you can homebrew it and turn on GC support and then with the switch VC isnt even available
 

iQuasarLV

Member
Now I know the easy answer is to buy the Original Hardware and games, but its 2021 dammit, I want it to be easier and in some cases, looking at you Earthbound!, Cheaper to buy or play digitally.

What brought me to this was the upcoming release of Metroid Dread, I like Metroid but there are a couple of games I've not played or want to replay and looking at my collections I only have access to whats on Switch right now (I miss my collection of Retro, but I had bills to pay :( ) which limits me to Metroid and Super Metroid on Switch or the SNES Classic.

This only leaves me with very few options:

  • Buy a Wii U and play through VC or the Disc version of Prime Trilogy (also a pain as I did own the Digital version of this I'm sure, but the older Nintendo accounts were different)
  • Buy a GBA or 3DS for Fusion, I do have a 3DS somewhere, and I still have the Cart for Fusion as well as the Digital version on Wii U, then buy the Remake of Samus Returns, a game that was released a year after the Switch's release (and Nintendo wonder why Metroid doesn't sell well)
  • Emulation with Dolphin, admittedly, this could be great option to play at a better framerate and resolution on the Prime Series as well

What is more annoying is Nintendo could easily address this with their NSO or VC stores, but they just don't, take a look at what Xbox do with older franchises such as Halo, I can go back and play every single Halo game on my Brand New Xbox Series X whenever I want before Infinite's release (in fact I did this with the PC version just before Infinite was delayed last year)
Option 3 dude. Because your enjoyment is not contingent on Nintendo's allowance of it. Fuck em. They don't want the profit, their loss.
 

SCB3

Member
As far as I know your Brand New Xbox Series X can play all of those titles using emulation, or you can just play on PC.
Sucks that you have bills to pay, but also the cash to pay for console just to play Metroid, especially when you have a PC and a Brand New Xbox Series X.

Yeah, Nintendo are really annoying.
HAD bills to pay, I've paid them and moved on, Covid did suck fucking hard for me like it did for many others
 
Economy is good
Save money for rainy day
Other countries are laughing
Crisis hits
Pump money into economy nobody getting fired
Other countries aren't laughing anymore

COVID more like LAMEVID.
 
Nintendo doesn’t benefit from making it a hard time to play their vintage games. I think the OG PS3 far did it best with backwards compatibility.
Odd that the consoles with the best backwards compatibility tend to be the least successful.

Vita, Xbox One and Wii U have great BC as well.
 

Esppiral

Member
I play anything Nintendo up to the Wii on my Xbox Series X, so I don't care what overpriced options if any Nintendo provides.
 

Scotty W

Member
They are one of the few companies that have legacy games worth playing, for now. I have been using Switch online recently, and I have to say, the 8 and 16 bit generations are sliding into unplayability, even stuff that seemed eternal. Nintendo is aware of both facts and is staggering their releases across generations to generate as much income as possible. Sure, this makes a few fanatics on the internet upset, but the vast majority of gamers are entirely disconnected from this way of thinking.
 

evanft

Member
The best way to play the Metroid Prime series is Primehack, full stop. You get mouse/keyboard controls, 4k60 rendering, improved textures, adjustable FOV, better load times, etc.
 
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