I am a little upset about Brawl being pushed to March 9 but I cant do anything about that. Now I think if Nintendo can't get the game out the day they say then they should put a TBA for the date it comes out and stop pissing people off with this crap.

Ok, I am done venting. What is the chance of Brawl getting another pushed to another date?

- Smash bro. #1 fan

Very low. The game is coming out in Japan later this week, barring catastrophe. (You don't delay a game for only one week unless you're damn sure you'll release it then.) It's curious, though, that the game gets delayed for a week in Japan and an entire month in America. Surely, the localization of the game wouldn't need that much more time. Could it be that Nintendo expects that much demand that it needs that month to produce the game discs? And why aren't there any international release dates anymore?

The Brawl delay debacle started off with an ambitious promise by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. At E3 2005, he said he'd look to get a new Smash Bros. game out in time for the Wii launch, and make it online to boot. Although it was a tall order, a lot of people believed it would actually happen. It didn't, obviously. Then we get word that it'll be out in time for Christmas 2007. That seemed a realistic time frame. Alas, it got pushed back to February. Surely, it would be done by then? Nope. The writing was on the wall; it got delayed again. (At least it's online!)

The length of a delay isn't as bad as having multiple delays. This screws with people like us, looking forward to the game. It also messes up retailers, who need to plan weeks in advance. Those advertising circulars you see in your Sunday paper are printed more than a month before you see them. Brawl is going to be a big, big game, so the retail sector wants it to come out just as much as we do, as it will drive sales to stores. This is also why game companies like Nintendo make delay decisions weeks before they announce it to the public. Retailers need to know about it beforehand to make adjustments to their strategies.

That's also why companies can't TBA all of their games up until the home stretch. Everyone needs a ballpark estimate of when to expect a game to be released—retailers and distributors more than consumers—so they can get ready for it. It's a lot more complicated than just a publisher releasing a game and a consumer buying it. A lot of stuff happens in between.

As you know, Nintendo recently re-worked their website. And I remember hearing that the Japanese Virtual Console section of the site listed all six available virtual consoles plus two empty slots. Obviously one of those slots will now be filled by the Sega Master System. But, I was thinking..is the Virtual Boy going to be the other system? Or better yet, do you think the Virtual Boy has a shot to be part of the Virtual Console at any point? I never owned one, yet I have every other Nintendo system since the NES. I'm hoping Nintendo will make the games available in some capacity. It can't cost too much to put the games on the Virtual Console, right?

- doug

ct

It would be impossible to play a Virtual Boy game without the stereoscopic goggles that was the Virtual Boy itself. That's how the 3D graphics worked. The game displayed two slightly different images on two screens in such a way that looking at them with each of your eyes would create the illusion of depth. You can't do that on a regular television screen. Not even on the DS, unless you crossed your eyes.

I should mention that I hate the "x empty slots on a website" theory when it comes to seeing how many more systems we might see on Virtual Console. If I had 11 eggs and put them in an egg carton that held 12 eggs, there would be a spot left empty. That doesn't automatically mean I have another egg to put there, which is same logic people apply when looking at websites that are setup like Nintendo Japan's.

Nintendo will be adding more systems to the VC service, but which and how many remain to be seen. It could be one, two, three, or more. Personally, I'd love to see the Commodore 64 and a smattering of handheld systems.

NWR I have a question that the past GC and GBA owners have wondered. Is there any games (Besides Pokemon) in the future that's going to use the DS and Wii wireless capability together? I remember a few titles the GBA used with the GC when you linked them together that 'enhanced' some of the gameplay.

- Ferettlxix

I'm surprised at how few games have taken advantage of the link between the Wii and DS. I may be crazy, but I think there are more GC-GBA games that link than there are Wii-DS games. If that's the case, it's preposterous to think that more publishers haven't commissioned two versions to work together. Everyone and their mothers have a Nintendo DS, likely the same people that have a Wii. So why not take advantage of that? I know there are some games that will (Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, I think) and some current games do (Geometry Wars Galaxies), but Nintendo hasn't touted the feature very much.

Once Everyone's Nintendo Channel (or whatever NOA is going to call it in English) comes out in the U.S., people will be able to download DS demos from their Wii. I think that after people realize the Wii-DS link is possible, and very useful, more games will start taking advantage of it. I hope we get some connectivity-style games out of this partnership, because I absolutely loved Crystal Chronicles and Pac-Man Vs. on the GameCube, despite the hassle of setting everything up with the GBAs and the link cables. With how easy everything is now because of wireless communication, why aren't we seeing more of it?

Windy,

On behalf of the NWR community, I wanted to see what you've been doing to keep yourself busy lately. You're hardly ever on the forums, I can't remember the last time you participated in RFN, and mailbags have been on a long-time hiatus until recently.

Does your position as Director really take up so much of your time or have you just been busy with life outside of NWR? Pop in every now and then and drop us a line.

- vudu

Chicago, IL

Remember that all of us here on staff work here on a volunteer basis. We work here on our free time. Yes, we're crazy. But we do it because we love it.

But you knew that. The reason why you may be seeing much of me lately might be related to the fact that I don't have as much free time as I did a few months ago. I'm full-time at school, working toward my degree in journalism. That takes a lot of time right there. I'm also working a lot of hours at my day job, at which I am actually penning this mailbag. My time to play games is pretty much limited to what I need to review, trying to squeeze in Zack & Wiki, Mario Galaxy, and Geometry Wars whenever I find the time to do so. I just got Burnout Paradise for the Xbox 360, which isn't helping me get much done. I play games just like everyone else!

But I digress. A lot of the work I'm doing for the site right now is behind the scenes. We're currently planning a lot of really, really cool things for NWR, which I hope to tell you more about soon. This stuff takes time and effort to do, and I'm taking a lot of both. I will admit I could be around more, especially in the forums. I assure you, once we're done with what we're planning, you'll see a lot more of me. More than you want to see, probably. (Be careful what you wish for!)

And the mailbag? It was gone for too long. But now it's back, more or less. I make time to do the mailbag, since it's my legacy or something. But I can't do it if I don't have questions. If you want to make sure you've got something informative, interesting, and entertaining to read every Sunday, go to church. If you just want to see the NWR mailbag update every Sunday, send in a lot of questions! You never know what I'll answer, or how I'll answer it. Longtime readers of the 'bag know that I'm prone to editorially rant about topics that tickle my fancy. For instance...

So I've got space left for one VC game on my Wii Menu. My question is, how badly does Nintendo want my money? I suppose I won't have a choice when I run out of physical memory but it would be nice to have a more flexible system in place. Any word on a system update of this nature? How about a folder system to sort out my growing collection? And while I'm dreaming, how about a means of redownloading directly from the main menu, independently from the Shop Channel?

- TheZizz

I'm going to answer your question by responding to some of the common excuses Nintendo uses to justify the design of the Wii Menu system and how Virtual Console games are stored on them. Then I'm going to give Nintendo some suggestions on what it should do to fix this mess.

Most people won't use all 48 channel spaces.

True enough. The majority of Wii owners will never own enough VC games to fill up four channel screens. However, the minority that is complaining about this problem is doing so because it's buying a lot of Virtual Console games! It's good business sense to make sure your high-volume customers are 100% satisfied with a service. Nintendo is not doing this, or else people like you wouldn't complain.

Like you said, you'd like to buy more games, but the lack of readily available channel space is preventing people from doing that. There are ways around this limitation, but they use Nintendo logic. It isn't very good logic.

You can delete Virtual Console games to free space and re-download them at any time.

Again, true. It is handy to be able to download VC games as many times as you want (only to the console that purchased it in the first place, obviously) in the event that you accidentally delete a game. But asking someone to do this in order to buy new games is downright silly.

The Wii was clearly not designed for VC games to be deleted regularly. The process to do so is much less elegant than purchasing them. It's somewhat confusing, too. What if you accidentally deleted the save game file instead of the actual game?

There's also the question of choosing which games you need to delete. Getting rid of a game will more than likely mean you're not going to see it again for a while, because if you ever got the urge to play it again you would need to delete a different game to make room for it. If you need to do this regularly, there may come a point when you don't want to bother doing it anymore. At that point, Nintendo stops making money.

You can save Virtual Console games to an SD card if you don't want to delete them.

Yes I can. This, however, is no different than deleting and re-downloading. Any games I have on an SD card must first be transferred to the Wii, but if I have games there in the first place, chances are I'm out of channels on the Wii Menu and need to transfer one back to the SD card or delete it altogether. Instead of dealing with the Wii Shop channel to free space for games, I need to deal with the Wii Settings menus. But wait, I had to deal with the Wii Settings to delete the game in the first place!

And there's something else about this that bothers me, and should bother Nintendo. If it gives you this recommendation, that means you need to purchase an SD memory card if you don't already have one. Sure, they're cheap. You can easily get one for $20 or less. But wouldn't Nintendo rather you spend that $20 on 2000 Wii Points worth of Virtual Console games? Wouldn't you rather spend that money on VC games? If you're having a problem with the lack of channel space, then you probably would.

The Wii can't play Virtual Console games directly from an SD card.

SD storage of VC games wouldn't be a problem if not for this. If we could just plug in a card full of previously purchased games and choose which one to play directly off of it, few would mind. Some reports claim that playing a game directly off of an SD card would be too slow. I'm no expert on the Wii hardware, but I smell bullshit here. By saying this, they are also also saying the Wii can't load a tiny little NES game (and its emulator) from an SD card directly into Wii RAM and play the game from there. I'm pretty sure the console has enough memory to handle that.

A console processor gets all its information from memory, not from the storage device. While a slow storage device will create long loading times, it's not a problem for games that don't have any loading. (Animal Crossing on the GameCube didn't have any loading screens at all after the initial boot. The entire game loaded into the RAM of the console!) Playing larger N64 or disc-based VC games off of an SD card may be impractical, but I doubt it's impossible. It's certainly not for the early cartridge-based systems. While playing off an SD card may create longer start-up times for VC games, they would be much, much shorter than the five-minute hassle that is deleting and re-downloading games to make space for new ones.

The real reason why I think Nintendo insists we can't have direct SD play is that it may have something to do with the encryption or security on games that ensures that a game you purchase for use on your Wii can only be played on that Wii. It's very hard, if not impossible, to see what the Wii is looking at inside of a VC file that lies in the internal console flash memory. But if you can see how the Wii interprets data directly from an SD card, which outsiders can view and control data I/O, it may be possible to decrypt Nintendo's keys and make it possible to play any VC game on any console, without paying Nintendo for the privilege to do so. That theory seems a lot more realistic than not being able to load games from an SD card, if you ask me.

Please, Steven. Give us some suggestions on how to make this problem go away!

Well gosh, Nintendo, thanks for asking!

The easiest and most obvious solution to the problem is to simply add more empty channel pages to the Wii Menu. The amount of channels should be limited by the 512 MB of Wii flash memory, not some number that "most" people will not reach. There shouldn't be any technical reasons why Nintendo can't do this, since all the Wii is really doing is reading what channels it has in memory and displaying them on the main screen.

If Nintendo is hell-bent on keeping the Wii Menu locked down at four pages, it should at least make games easier to delete or transfer to an SD card. Why not have a little trash can icon on the Wii Menu somewhere? It would be easy to drag and drop VC games into it to clear space from the menu before heading into the shop channel. And you'd never need to go in the Wii System memory, either. If Nintendo recommends this process, it should incorporate it into the Wii Menu.

The most elegant solution would be to consolidate all Virtual Console games into a single channel. It would be practical for those with a lot of games, since by the time someone would have enough fill the Wii Menu, they might have trouble organizing them all. A VC channel could sort games to make it easy to find what you want to play. It could even promote new games like the Everyone's Nintendo Channel. Such a channel could be optional (sort of like the Photo Channel 1.1 update) in case some people prefer to keep the games spread out over the Wii menu.

Nintendo needs to do something about this problem soon. If not, it will become a problem that more and more people will have. Nintendo may lose a significant amount of revenue if it continues to inconvenience people long enough. The frustrating thing about it all is that there are many easy solutions that will make the problem go away. Yet, Nintendo doesn't want to hear any of it. We all thought it was in the dark when it came to online gaming, but this is a new level of ignorance for Nintendo. It really is.