The Video Game Critic

Nintendo has just announced the SNES Classic, in the same vein as last year's NES Classic. It will release September 29th with 21 games at the suggested price of $79.99, and I. WANT. IT.

The list of games is:

Contra III: The Alien Wars™
Donkey Kong Country™
EarthBound™
Final Fantasy III
F-ZERO™
Kirby™ Super Star
Kirby’s Dream Course™
The Legend of Zelda™: A Link to the Past™
Mega Man® X
Secret of Mana
Star Fox™
Star Fox™ 2
Street Fighter® II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
Super Castlevania IV™
Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts®
Super Mario Kart™
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars™
Super Mario World™
Super Metroid™
Super Punch-Out!! ™
Yoshi’s Island™

This should make the scalpers happy!

Seriously, though, that list is absolute dynamite! I fully intend to use some PTO to wait outside of Best Buy! This, unlike the NES Classic, is worth waiting in line for! They had me at Final Fantasy III, Starfox 2, and Secret of Mana!

Not sure if I should be saying this, but I work in fraud prevention at the Walmart home office. Just recently they made the decision to no longer sell to bulk buyers or resellers, so you shouldn't have to worry about that on our end!

Meh. Never saw the NES Classic, will most likely never see this. Hell, there are still zero stores in my area with Switches. Just a whole lot of empty shelves. Im surprised retailers are still putting up with that. They hate empty space.

I'm a little disappointed they don't have Chrono Trigger or the second and third Donkey Kong games, but then again I already own all three of those off the Virtual Console so it's not that big a loss.

Impressive roster, not going to go down the rabbit hole Nintendo dug for themselves with the NES Classic though, so, they won't get my money for this. Unfortunately as it seems.

DaHeckIzDat wrote:Not sure if I should be saying this, but I work in fraud prevention at the Walmart home office. Just recently they made the decision to no longer sell to bulk buyers or resellers, so you shouldn't have to worry about that on our end!

How do they intend to enforce that? I can see them limiting one-per-person which they should, I mean that's just a no-brainer from a business sense. A lot of those scalpers were people that were lining up at the store early every morning when the NES Classic was "available" and those people treated it like a full time job. In fact I suspect a lot of them didn't have jobs, scalping the Classic was their job. I can't recall how many pictures I saw on OfferUp of some bastard selling a Classic and his picture would show a stack of twenty of them. And not one of those MFers was willing to do a trade, everyone of those c***s was cash-only.


Good game selection though. But one part of it REALLY pisses me off. Secret of Mana, Nintendo, really!? WE'VE WANTED THAT GAME ON VIRTUAL CONSOLE FOR THE WII U FOR DAMN NEAR FIVE YEARS AND INSTEAD OF RELEASING IT FOR VIRTUAL CONSOLE FOR WII U OR 3DS OR EVEN FOR THE SWITCH, NOPE THAT WOULD MAKE TOO MUCH FINANCIAL SENSE! INSTEAD THEY RELEASE IT ON A NOVELTY COMPACT GAME CONSOLE THAT WILL LIKELY BE IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND????? REAL SMART NINTENDO.

[Mod Edit: Qbert language] Nintendo. All the way.

There's some pleasantly surprising inclusions here that I genuinely didn't expect:

-Earthbound: Yeah, it's on Wii U and New 3DS Virtual Console, so maybe it's a given to expect it by this point, but just a few years ago Nintendo loved pretending that this game didn't exist.

-Star Fox 2: This game was previously unreleased and the version you see on ROM sites is a nearly finished prototype. Very interesting move from Nintendo to release this officially for the first time.

-Yoshi's Island: The SNES version of this game has never gotten a Virtual Console release, which is a crying shame considering it's one of the crowning achievements of the era.

All of the games on here are great choices...but I wish there were 30 games like on the NES Classic Edition (and there are plenty of other games that would have been great inclusions), especially considering the higher price of this one. Oh well, someone's definitely going to find out how to hack the device anyway.

Nintendo has proven many times over that they purposefully underproduce their products. Seeing $250 NES Classics didn't make me angry at the resellers. It made me angry with Nintendo. I want to give you my $60, Nintendo. Why won't you take it?

The official word is they are going to make "substantially more" SNES minis than NES minis, but we have no idea what that means since they won't release official numbers. But they also specified that they will only going to produce this system "through the end of 2017."

Translation: We're still Nintendo; nothing has changed. The chances of you seeing this product in a store are next to zero. Have fun buying it from Craigslist for $400.

It's unlikely you'll ever be able to play Starfox 2 on a SNES without a repro-cart using another Super FX game as a donor, so that alone makes it worth $80. But only that much. If I can't get it from a store I'm not going second-hand.