Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Part 3 of my Virtual Console wish list will name five titles I might buy for Virtual Console, as well as what changes could be made to the Virtual Console to make it a better place to play.

Read on, the suspense is killing you.

1. CHRONO TRIGGER [1995/SNES] What? Maybe? Maybe he would buy Chrono Trigger? Yeah, maybe. I’ve played Chrono Trigger start-to-finish so many times that I doubt I’d really enjoy playing through it again. Most of the games on the Virtual Console that I want to play are games that would be a better experience there than emulated on your home computer. There, I said it. For those who missed Chrono Trigger, it’s the greatest RPG ever made. It’s better than its sequel, Chrono Cross, but there’s not much space in that window, if you catch my drift.

2. WARSONG [1991/Genesis] Warsong, or Langrisser in Japan, is a turn-based strategy game. This is another situation where I played a game so much I might not enjoy it any longer, and I’m not convinced playing it on VC would be preferrable to an emulation.

3. EXCITEBIKE 64 [2000/N64] Excitebike 64 was one of the games I had in the brief period of time that I owned a used, dying Nintendo 64. This game caused the system to crash more than any other, but it made a decent impression on me in that time. Racing is fun, and it stands up well to the test of time. Even Pole Position can be fun nowadays, and man, is that one dated.

4. SUPER MARIO KART [1992/SNES] Speaking of racing, there’s Super Mario Kart, the original, and some would say still unmatched, kart racer. Mario Kart DS is out on the Nintendo DS right now, and is a fantastic game, and perhaps the main reason I would think twice before buying this one. MKDS has four tracks from the original SNES game, faithfully recreated in 3D. The refined mechanics in the DS game make it a more accessible game, and it runs a lot faster, meaning the racing is much more satisfying. If only Donkey Kong Jr. were in Mario Kart DS, this game wouldn’t be on the list at all.

5. ETERNAL CHAMPIONS [1993/Genesis] Eternal Champions was an original fighting game, produced by Sega, featuring a number of pretty well-designed characters, each of which had a distinctive fighting style. This was a game that tried to hock the Genesis 6-button controller. The game had taunts, fatalities, traps built into the environments, and a lot more. Researching now, I see that there was a Sega CD version of the game with a lot more characters and a number of other additional features. If they threw down the Sega CD version, that sounds like the direction I would go.

What the Virtual Console needs

Our split-screen multiplayer games have to be turned into online multiplayer games. Without online mutliplayer, games like Super Mario Kart are not going to be worth playing nowadays. Games like Goldeneye and Gunstar Heroes would be great to play online, but without that functionality, the experience is going to feel lacking by today’s standards.

Audio-visual enhancements on the really popular games would be a huge bonus. Nintendo needs to watch what’s selling the best and polish the graphics and sound on those games a few notches, or convince whoever’s behind the game to do so. Virtual Console has an “update” ability for the games you’ve downloaded, which claims to pick up any “enhancements” to a downloaded game free of charge, so it seems to me like this may already be in the cards.

Localizations of non-US titles so that we Yanks can play ‘em. This includes the high-profile games like Sin and Punishment and Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo, as well as more obscure games like the Langrisser sequels and Doshin the Giant. It can’t be too hard to localize a small, old game with modern, skilled (not you, Konami) localization teams. I would also like to see better localizations of the games that did make it over. It might be fun to play Zero Wing if you understood what the hell they were saying.

A couple of final thoughts on what we could use: arcade games, and some original titles. An N64 port of the Saturn version of Symphony of the Night (which had a lot more content than the PS1 version) would not be impossible with the additional storage space afforded by SD Cards, just as a solid example.

Talk to me, people.