Tuesday, April 8, 2014

GameBoy Advance Games on Wii U Virtual Console

So, GBA games are now available on the Wii U Virtual Console by now. At first I thought it was a weird decision to have these on the Wii U, instead of the 3DS, ambassador program aside. But on the other hand the Wii U GamePad looks and feels like a giant GBA, so it's not completely out of place. I guess in the future Nintendo should aim at a shared VC anyway. So, if I buy The Minish Cap, I should be able to play it both on Wii U and 3DS and maybe even share my savegames cloud-style.

Since A Link to the Past seems to be stuck with the SNES version and Four Swords already got its DSi makeover, the only interesting game for Zelda fans here is The Minish Cap. I hope, they actualy fix the European version, which lacked the third Bomb Bag upgrade and got a nasty bug, where you can screw up the Kinstone fusions with one of the scarecrows, which ultimately leads to one Goron missing for the Goron Cave, so that you can't get the last Bottle, Biggoron or the Mirror Shield. Bad stuff.

Normally Nintendo probably wouldn't bother with that, for example they let the GBA shop stay closed in the Oracle games on VC. But in case of the GBA games for Wii U, the company M2 is actually working on that (source), which seem to add more love into the emulation business. They even included scans of the original GBA game manuals! How awesome is that?

So, there is a small hope that they take care of the inferior European version of The Minish Cap. If not, I will just keep playing the US version on Visual Boy Advance...