In a move that should surprise absolutely no one, Nintendo has announced that Pokemon Snap is also on its way to the U.S. Virtual Console.
The big news about this game release is that Nintendo has added new Wii functionality to the Nintendo 64 original. Now, you can send the pictures you take of your Pokemans to your Wii friends.
I know just what you’re thinking: That is boring as hell. And I agree. I’m never going to do this, even if Susan is. But think of the ramifications: Nintendo is actually upgrading a Virtual Console release with new features. Online features, at that.
Imagine what could be possible if they extended this to their other games! Here’s our wishlist of online features we’d like to see crammed in to our Virtual Console library.
- Online play for Mario Kart 64. Or really anything, but I think we can agree that Mario Kart is the best candidate for an upgrade in this department. Of course, Nintendo would never allow anyone to actually chat between matches, so it’s not like you’d know you were racing an actual human being.
- __Leaderboards for Super Mario Bros. __Imagine the replay value this would add to retro games if you could try to beat your friends’ scores.
- A Nintendo World Championship-style contest game. They could take several of their classic games and patch them together haphazardly to form a timed challenge game. Collect high scores from these, and then, I don’t know. Fly the winners out somewhere for the grand finals? Send everybody a plush Kirby?
- __A list of games you’ve beaten. __What if, in addition to individual leaderboards they simply had an Achievements-style board for all Virtual Console game players that kept records of which games you had actually beaten? Then you could show this list off to your friends and be like that’s right, totally cleared Ninja Gaiden. “I solved that game tape,” you could say.
And that’s just what I came up with in the last five minutes. I’m sure Nintendo can think of lots of things to add to their classic games, and if they can jerry-rig filesharing into Pokemon Snap then surely they can hack the Super Mario Bros. ROM and pull your high score out of RAM when you get a Game Over, no?
Oh, and I nearly forgot: Nintendo released three more Virtual Console games, which are Zanac, Dynastic Hero, and Eternal Champions and I think that yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn somebody wake me when Virtual Console becomes interesting again.