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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo is more likely than most publishers to delay releases to avoid competing with themselves. Their new virtual console strategy is a slow drip feed that won't distract from their main titles or impact sales at all, so a subscription fee.

If they every have a badly selling console like the Wii u again expect them to ramp up emulators to look generous and add a lot of value quickly.

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This is why we ban advertising to children and copyright should expire after 30 years, there's nothing but rent-seeking going on and taking advantage of nostalgia. This isn't encouraging creative works which is why we as a country give the monopoly to artists in the first place. People should have the right to remix the culture they grew up with.

Some people believe copyright should be perpetual. Those people are wrong, but we must still fight against that idea.

I blame the widespread adoption of digital communications. What's the saying? A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can pull its pants up?

We should have kept the internet for nerds only. The day we introduced e-commerce to the internet, we killed it.

Eternal September indeed.

Is the market for Nintendo games really so small that decades-old titles will meaningfully compete with their current ones? Surely the demand for SMB must be minuscule compared to the demand for their modern games among consumers?

Is Breath of the Wild really going to lose sales to Legend of Zelda? Are there really consumers who will only buy one or the other?

Not to NES games, but it might distract from news about it (minor effect on sales) and their emulation catalogue is now up to GameCube games. So the question is whether a five or ten dollar copy of wind Waker could distract from an 80 dollar tears of the kingdom.

They also have more marginal games - captain toad or whatever - sold at the same price as their big titles. Those seem pretty vulnerable imo.

IMO the newest Mario Kart (Switch 2) is the first one that’s probably better than Double Dash. That’s three consoles in a row where I think the GameCube game’s better than the newer offerings (and that’s not even a nostalgia game for me—that’d be the original, and the N64 one, neither of which is very good).

I'll second this. DoubleDash was _so good_ that it really hasn't been beat since (I haven't played MK World, the latest, so can't assess that yet)

The ordinary game is pretty damn good, but all the tracks exist in one "world" and your character + kart are racing around it on autopilot in the background of the main menu. You can press a button to dismiss the menu and take over the kart, and start a free-roam mode of the entire game-world with all kinds of challenges and such to select from.

I'm not quite sure it displaces Double Dash as far as straight-up obsoleting it, but it's the first I've seen that brings enough good new stuff to the table that I'd at least sometimes choose it over DD, all else being equal. Every other one I was like "this is OK but I'd sorta rather just be playing Double Dash".

Melee is widely regarded int he community as much better than the successors, too, and it's pretty much the only game that survived its sequel in the whole series

Yeah I've played more Mario Kart than Smash Bros. and am only a very-casual player of either (... but this surely describes the overwhelming majority of people buying and playing these games?) so I wouldn't claim with some kind of authority that Melee's the best Smash Bros., but all the ones since have felt way too fiddly for me and I didn't enjoy them at all, despite really liking the first two entries in the series (and especially Melee).

Another case where my "nostalgia" one is the N64 game, not Melee, so I don't think it's a nostalgia thing making me prefer the Gamecube version.

For a comparison, try to find a good legal version of Namco Pac-Man on mobile that isn't locked under a Namco Museum Vol. 1 IAP. The Namco Museum app itself is "free" and you get 1942, but have to buy the others.

The virtual console is now offering GameCube titles. GameCube/PS2/XBox was the tipping point when most major 3D releases looked reasonably good and the hardware was strong enough that developers were encountering fewer limitations that hampered the games in very fundamental ways. Compare Resident Evil 1 on the Playstation to the remake one generation later on the GameCube to see a very direct example of this.

Additionally video games can be a major time investment. Disney doesn't worry about the older Star Wars movies cannibalizing interest in the new ones because you can match the original trilogy in a single evening, were beating a single game could potentially take months. The quality of the entire Zelda series on average is extremely high and the majority of the games are still worth playing, a young gamer could easily start going through the library and find themselves having enough fun to just keep focusing on that instead of purchase the latest and greatest at top dollar.

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