the eponymous bollock wrote:Glad they announced preorders well ahead of time and put them up at a time when most people were likely to be able to get online and actually sent emails out to people who registered an interest.
Good job Nintendo
Yeah, I never got an e-mail from Amazon or Nintendo.
Rax wrote:Pilotwings is the big omission, the DKC sequels as well would have been nice to have on there.
DKC2/3 probably aren't there because Miyamoto hates them. They deliberately don't contain Donkey Kong and only Rare's original characters because Rare were pissed off with Nintendo at the time. Miyamoto was shitting on their Silicon Graphics stuff, because it made Nintendo look worse than a 2nd party at graphics. He once made an infamous comment that Donkey Kong has poor gameplay but gets away with it with good graphics. That's why Yoshi's Island is hand-drawn style because Miyamoto has never embraced realism and that attitude has perforated Nintendo forever. It was other, younger producers in Nintendo (the ones who are showing up in press conferences etc now) that embraced Silicone Graphics stuff with Wave Race etc. on the '64 and it took Miyamoto a long time to catch up. Even Twilight Princess is cel-shaded. Everyone assumes Rare's relationship to Nintendo was great but it really was just as strained as with MS (eventually leading to the Stamper Brothers leaving) because they were forced to do stuff to their games they didn't want to do. Such as in the case of Dinosaur Planet, pretty much 100% finished when Nintendo said to gut it and make it a Starfox game. Once Rare were sold to MS they didn't even bother with it, which is why the graphics are top notch but the game is pretty average. They just didn't care anymore. I kind of wish Rare was an independent studio but, to be honest, I think their output would be (and arguably is) pretty poor because they have leaned on producer's input from part owners for so long now and so much of the talent has moved on.
Apart from the licensing issues, this and similar reasons are why retro Rare games are mostly missing from Nintendo systems. Rare wanted to see the back of Nintendo after being tied for so long to a system that really wasn't very successful (N64). It was Nintendo that decided to sell their shares (back to Rare I believe) after they were tired of waiting for Rare's games to move along and there wasn't much to be gained from the relationship anymore. It wasn't Rare that could decide to do that - it was Nintendo that afforded them the opportunity to cut ties. Which they did by selling 100% to Microsoft.
captain red dog wrote:So Star Fox 2 then. I'm guessing as an 'unlockable' it's an excuse for them not to have to optimise the original build and fully debug etc to get it into a state equivalent to an original SNES release.
The game is 100% finished - it was even sent to Mario Club for debugging and testing. The leaked ROM is a beta version. It was confirmed by Eurogamer speaking to a programmer on the project. The only reason they didn't release the game was it did some things better than Miyamoto did in Starfox 64 while it was still in development, and Nintendo hate being shown up. So they canned the game at the last minute, implemented various 3D features in Starfox 64 (and possibly Mario 64 as well) so that it would look better next to PS1 and Saturn games.
They never even paid Argonaut for it. Nintendo are known to have pinched a lot of stuff from their partners and taken credit for it or dumbed it down in some way. They've even completely destroyed games from Western developers who they cannot form a working relationship with because they have incredibly stubborn working practices, and Japanese is basically impenetrable, but it's gotten better over the years with Retro Studios, NST (I think?) etc.
Including the infamous Super Mario ROM from the Internet (but that's partly because it seems some of Nintendo's own archival copies / ROMs are missing or corrupted and so it was faster to just download it. After all, it's their intellectual property and was never licensed to be distributed in any other format than a cartridge).
Been talking to the other half about this console, she wants it but only because it's very, very small.
So I'm going to CNC mill a European SNES body for a Pi 2 and install a genuine SNES controller port in it, that will work over GPIO and RetroArch/EmulationStation (Retropi). Basically strawberry float it, can literally make my own mini SNES and I can even legally play 3 of the ROMs included with this on it. For well under £69 or the £80+ retailers are asking for it.