The Geeky Brit

So, I had remarked earlier about the lack of quality Wii Games currently available. I have been very much enjoying my Wii sports time, but I am at the point in Wii Tennis where I can win and still lose points…

So I thought maybe it is time to check out the Virtual Console selections on the Wii Shop Channel. I had been holding off as I thought playing old games would be a harsh reminder of how far gaming has come. I have always believed that one should never try and meet their childhood heroes, as they are never as nice or as cool as you remember them.

But eventually I gave in to temptatio, and downloaded 2 games:
Bomberman ’93 – orginally for the TurboGrafx 16
Mario Kart 64 – originally for the Nintendo 64

Wow. First off, I can’y believe I was so hesitant. Let me comment on Bomberman first.

Bomberman has long been a favorite game of mine. The idea is simple, lay bombs to blow up blocks in a 2D environment, and when enough blocks have been cleared, start blowing up other players. It is a simple 2D grid based game, which is amazingly addictive, and great fun to play with a group of people. The TurboGrafx version I downloaded is not graphically beautiful of course, although it has a certain charm, but my word the fun! It was a great download, and I strongly recommend it. I cannot think of a better multiplayer game that is as easy to pickup, and is as widely appealing as this.

Mario Kart 64 robbed me of my fresher (freshman) year of college. A friend of mine bought a N64 and we spent many hours, seemingly every minute we could actually, playing this great game. Again, the graphics are now not amazing – sprites on a 1080p 52″ widescreen look bad – but when you are having this much fun, who cares?

The down side to this game is that you have to have the Wii Classic controller in order to play this, which makes multiplayer games hard unless you have multiple classic controllers (see The cost of Nintendo Wii Controllers). The other disappointment is that there is no support for saving records or ghost files on the Wii memory – the game thinks there is no memory pack. Come on nintendo, surely you could have implemented this? I mean part of the fun of the game in single player was racing against yourself in the time trials.
Btw, Mario Kart came out 10 years ago.

Even with these limitations though, it is still a very much worthwhile game to download.

Sonic and Mario?
The most interesting thing for me about the games on the Wii Shop Channel, is that I can download both “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Mario” games. Ahhh I remember fondly when there were fights at school over which was better….

Which should I download?