Get equipped with...perspective!

"She is? So what now, do I enter my 
credit card number or something?"

-Kids these days

As I may have mentioned before, I am, despite a fairly severe case of being an adult, a video game fan. Specifically games from the late eighties and early nineties. And not to sound like a cranky old person-which, ok, I am-but it was a time when video games were games and not flimsy pretexts upon which to convince players to pay real world money for in-game bullshit. That's not to say that developers weren't in it for the money back then too, it's just that given the absence of any real internet ecosystem, they had to create something, stick on a cartridge and sell it in a store.

Hot Topic:
'Stroking your nostalgia gland since 1989'

I bring this up because as much as I sometimes feel that gaming, as a thing, has moved beyond me, there really is a segment of the industry that knows that idiot retro game fans will pretty much buy anything. Like anything. Sometimes more than once. Publishers know this, that I'm an idiot I mean. An idiot for nostalgia. And that's why Nintendo's announcement about Virtual Console doesn't surprise me. Huh? What announcement or what's a Virtual Console? Because you know what kind of blog this is right? What's that? Yeah, I don't know either, and yet...

Did I say bated breath? I might have meant
labored. We don't get off the couch a lot.

Fine, I'll nerd'splain. The VC (if you're in a hurry) has for the last twelve years or so been Nintendo's way of selling you digital copies of old games on more recent consoles. It's kind of a scam in that they never let you transfer your purchases to new consoles, and the catalogue is a bit of a mess, but like I said, we're stupid for nostalgia and so we keep buying these things over and over again and we've all been waiting with bated breath for word of when VC would be available on the Switch.

"Alright nerds, you're going to relive some
cherished childhood memories, or else."

-Nintendo's marketing department

...well, that's how I remember it

Today we found out that it's never. Nintendo, a company sort of famous for hating money, has decided not to let us buy the same games we already bought but this time on Switch. Instead, they will opt to let us pay a subscription fee for their online service which will let gamers netflix (sorry, I just verbed netflix) classic NES games. Specifically twenty of them. It's actually a pretty decent line-up and they'll be online enabled for multiplayer so that's cool. But almost all of the games are ones we totally just bought on those NES Classics they forced us to buy. Yes, forced. You can't pump out tiny, adorable, working NES consoles and expect me not to buy one.

And this is probably fine. I mean, sooner or later and in some form or another, they're going to ask me to pay for Super Mario Bros. 2 for the umpteenth time, and I, like a dutiful dupe am going to do it. They know right where I'm weakest: my will power.

"We-a never leave-a the money on the table!"

-Nintendo spokesstereotype, Luigi

No, really.

So why complain? Oh, right, because this is the internet. And in that spirit of complaining about things over which I have control, I'd like to call out this ridiculous bullshit. Didn't click? Fine. A company called iam8bit (cute, huh?) recently sold fancy, limited collectors editions of Street Fighter II. Like, actual, reproduction SNES cartridges. Supposedly they worked, although the company warned buyers not to actually put them in a SNES console for fear that it might catch on fire.

Sure, it's a lttle dinged up and some kid
named 'Kevin' wrote his name on the
back in permanent marker, but still.

So what kind of person pays $100 for a reproduction cartridge of a game that costs $12 on ebay? Oh, and might burn your house down? A true fan that's who. And that's why they're now attempting to part additional fools from additional money with the double whammy of Mega Man 2 (the best one) and Mega Man X (the best-er one) limited edition (only 8,500!) repro cartridges for a hundred bucks each. Which again, ebay. I mean, don't get me wrong, these are great games but goddamn, you can buy authentic used copies of both for an eighth of the price.

Look, again, I love old video games in general and Mega Man in particular, but holy shit. The line must be drawn here. Artificially scarce copies of not-at-all-rare games that may or may not burn you to death selling for a hundred dollars a pop? Are we that driven by our over-inflated sense of nostalgia that we, as fans, will continue to fall for this time and time again? Yes. Of course we will. I guess they've really got our number. Goddamnit...

Yeah, that all sucks but did I mention that the Mega Man 2 cart is blue. Blue!