I liveblogged
Nintendo President Satoru Iwata's keynote at Game Developers Conference this morning; while the talk was mostly a love letter to Shigeru Miyamoto, it did include a few announcements of note. Perhaps most significant was a new firmware update for Wii -- available now, don't you know -- that finally makes the console a legitimate player in the digital delivery/downloadable content arena. Until now, the console has been, shall we say, hamstrung by its, ah, modest storage capacity. This will no longer be an issue, and that makes me (as a Virtual Console enthusiast) quite happy.
The most important addition this update makes to Wii is the added ability to run games -- both Virtual Console and WiiWare -- directly from an SD card. Until now, the SD slot was basically used to store extra photos and offload unplayed Virtual Console/WiiWare games so you could shuffle them around slowly and clumsily on the system menu when you want to swap between active and inactive titles. Now the SD card is simply an extension of the internal storage space. Early user reports suggest that it's a sort of "hot swap" approach, with games being loaded entirely into system memory when launched from an SD card, then purged afterwards. But whatever; the fact is that we don't have to go through the fridge-cleaning ritual, which active Virtual Console supporters like me have been dealing with since very early in the Wii's life.
Additionally, the Wii is now capable of supporting high-capacity SD cards; while 2GB is plenty of space, the system will now recognize cards as large as 32GB. That is a lot of NES games. The main limitation now is that SD cards will only support 20 pages of 12 channels, which my math tells me amounts to 240 games, but few people are likely to exceed that. Besides, you can always plug in a second SD card if you somehow go over the cap.
(Image appropriated from joystiq.com)
Almost as exciting is the fact that Virtual Console will soon be seeing the addition of arcade games. You'll note a heavy emphasis on Namco games in the slide above, although surprisingly not your obvious choices: no
Galaga or
Pac-Man, but rather the sort of "off-brand" titles like
Gaplus (the sequel to Galaga),
Mappy (a side-scrolling maze chase game), and the beautifully obscure
Solvalou (a
Xevious spin-off that I've been wanting to play for years). Oh, and
Tower of Druaga and its sequel, for the masochists among you.
Tecmo and Sega are also represented here -- but strangely enough, Nintendo isn't. While Nintendo's arcade legacy basically petered out around the time the NES launched, the addition of coin-op games to Virtual Console raises the prospect of the full, true, original version of
Donkey Kong finally making its way to a Nintendo console in its full glory. (Its only previous appearance was as an unlockable in
Donkey Kong 64, the obvious drawback there being that you had to play DK64 long enough to unlock it.)
Interestingly, Square Enix is finally relaxing its deathgrip on the company's biggest brand and will be allowing the full
Final Fantasy series to make its way to Virtual Console this year. Japan gets all six of the Nintendo-based Final Fantasy titles, while the U.S. apparently only gets the ones that were originally translated...and in fact,
Final Fantasy VI (nèe III) was conspicuous by the absence of any mention of it. Still, if nothing else, it's a pretty significant step for Square.
Unfortunately, there was no word of a similar VC service for the new DSi, despite the talk's heavy emphasis on the new handheld. But I guess it wouldn't be Nintendo if they didn't parcel out their information like it was the world's most precious resource. And hey, at least this gives us something to look forward to at E3.
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