One of the minor thrills of visiting Tokyo is dropping by the Mandarake Galaxy in Nakano and looking at the rack of not-really-for-sale rarities in the display case outside the shop. Usually it contains half a dozen rewritable Satellaview cartridges that have prized titles encoded on them — Super Famicom games that never received retail releases and thus exist only in the form of this handful of temporary ROMs. Well, and on the Internet, of course. Which is nice, because — say what you will about the ethics of ROM distribution — I sure don’t wanna pay $900 to play Radical Dreamers.
The lack of support for downloadable things from Nintendo is made more baffling when these things are brought to life. Surely the eShop or WiiWare would be a perfect place for new versions of Zelda and such. The BS versions are floating around online as roms, so it couldn’t be real hard for Nintendo to package them up as bountiful WiiWare treasures for a new audience. Hell, the 25th anniversary would even had been an excuse to do a disc release with all these previously unseen (in the west anyway) versions, along with the originals and other nice supplementary material. Surely a license to print money if ever there was.
Oh, I pitched that idea as far and wide as I could. Alas, it wasn’t to be… maybe on the 30th?
Really, it would have been a perfect complement to the Super Mario All-Stars release for Mario’s, only better, since we never got the 16-bit LoZ titles.
Just had a buddy over at Famicom World send me a copy of Gimmick! from a local Mandarake. Sure beats paying 3x as much on eBay. :)
I would pay good money for BS Zelda, A Link to the Past, Excitebike, Wrecking Crew, and Super Mario USA.
Why, Nintendo? Why won’t you let me give you my money?
Wait… there was a Satellaview BALLOON FIGHT?!?
Why am I only discovering this now?!?