"Revenge of Shinobi" is the most interesting one. That game had 5 versions; 1.00 through 1.04, with the first four alone hitting the Genesis. It was a mess of copyright and licensing issues. Not just Spiderman, but Rambo, Batman, Godzilla, Terminator. And on top of that, they started off as imposter characters, then some characters got officially licensed later, only to have the license not just gone again, but with some of the characters getting redrawn, which is where pink Spidey comes in. And as I think of it, "Pink Spider" is a song by a Japanese singer named Hide. He is no longer alive, but I have to wonder if the Pink Spiderman might be a reference.
Yeah the story behind revenge of shinobi is really cool. I'd love to make a video on that. Getting the footage for this game was difficult because there's no level select code or anything. Had to play through the game legit to get the Spider-Man footage, and that was quite the task considering how difficult this game is.
When I bought the Sega CD, it came with a cd with Genesis games, including Revenge of Shinobi. The tom in that cd had already altered all the licensed characters. It was disappointing because I played the original version when it came out.
The Virtual Console version of Shadow Dancer on the Genesis has the World Trade Center removed from the title screen, though not the ending bizarrely! But Nintendo got really lazy with the virtual console on the Wii U, several of the games are literally ROMs taken from a download site, as they still contain the original ROM name and even the hackers credit in the code!
Not to mention games seemed very dark. Like, very noticeably. It seemed weird how games looked and ran better on Wii than the next gen system that had architecture inside it.
I remember playing Sin and Punishment on the Wii Virtual console (Which was a Japan exclusive Nintendo 64 game that was only localized through the virtual console service.) There's a mission that takes place in New York in 2017 in which the city is attacked by a kaiju monster. I liked the game so I bought a real catridge. And one change I noticed was that the original release had a destroyed world trade center on the skybox in one cutscene where in the Wii Virtual console version It didn't. The game originally came out in 2000, one year before. 9/11
Revenge of Shinobi on VC also changed the title screen. It was originally a(n unlicensed) image of Sonny Chiba. For VC, they replaced him with a guy who works for M2, who did the Genesis emulation for VC.
The biggest problem that I have with the Virtual Console was that the games you bought would be stuck on the system, with no way to transfer them to another unit. If something happened to your Wii, you were pretty much out of luck unless you send the system to Nintendo for repair. Contrast this with the Xbox 360, where you could use a special transfer cable to bring your XBLA games and other stuff to another unit. PS3 allows you to have your digital games on up to 2 systems (5 systems earlier in its life.)
Not to mention the NES didn't really sell well in Europe due to the massive amount of 8 bit home computing competition Nintendo had to go against. Especially in the UK where nintendo's games sold at 30-40 british pounds a pop when you can get 6-8 ZX spectrum tape games for the same amount of $. What was a british parent going to buy for their kids? The ZX ofc.
Makes me wonder why they didn't make that a platform on EU Virtual Console... I mean, JP had the MSX, the US had the C64, why didn't you guys get anything like that?
Big new games on the ZX Spectrum were £10 each, but if yo wanted budget, you could get them for as cheap as £1.99, plus magazines would give away a bunch of full games for free on the cover! But the NES was really a rich kids toy in the UK, Mattel royally screwed up distribution and charged ridiculous prices for some games, I remember seeing Festers Quest and Star Wars for £80. You could buy THREE full priced Master System games even for that price!
The UK got C64 and TurboGfx* games on VC, along with the more popular consoles. I would have liked a ZX Spectrum section too, but it was probably too hard to find rights holders these days. I mean we got NeoGeo too, and hardly anyone owned one, maybe played an arcade, but nobody had the home version. *Probably named PC Engine , I can't remember.@@JSRphones
I am the proud owner of the slow PAL Sonic the Hedgehog on my Wii U after the Wii to Wii U transfere. However, if you purchased the Wii to Wii U VC upgraded games, some were actually "converted" to the NTSC version. I believe that the ones you bought on the 3DS VC e-store in Europe on the other hand was actually only the NTSC versions. Ideally, they should just have given people in all regions the option to chose which version you wanted to play when booting up the game.
PAL TVs since mid 80s are actually perfectly capable of displaying 60hz with NTSC line and frame timings but PAL colour, since PAL colour carrier actually sits higher in the frequency spectrum and the channels are wider, giving extra room for the base video (luminance) and control signals. But it's technically a standard violation so game console companies were a little hesitant to make use of that. Except most Dreamcast games have a 60Hz mode. Though typical 240-ish line progressive mode that all 8/16bit consoles used in NTSC is non standard as well, because it uses an even total number of lines instead of odd and the half line offset of the second field is missing, so all timings are a little tortured to fit.
60Hz was indeed quickly adopted but actual NTSC color compatibility took a while. Even 2 Trinitrons I've tested from 1991 and 1997 do not have NTSC from the get-go and require soldering+service menu commands to enable them. Thankfully a portion of the NTSC systems used RGB output ontop of composite: RGB completely bypasses the old color systems and goes color on any TV with RGB input, which most early european TVs had access to. However an NTSC N64 won't be able to have that luxury being stuck on composite output. NTSC compatible CRTs would begin to show up in the mid-90s but were the most expensive models ( Sony Super Trinitrons ), and would only become affordable at the start of the 3rd millenia, when they started appearing in grey and silver shells.
It´s a problem with all digital gaming. GTA games were downgraded with updates, removing songs for copyright, even after you paid for the game with those songs.
Yup, my Xbox one wouldn’t allow me to play my digital game GTA San Andreas due to an update so I took the console offline and was able to play it. I haven’t played it in a while so not sure if that can still be achieved that way tho
Yeap and it happen as recently too as Jirard the Completionist was just removed from Sea of Stars. If you hadn't updated the game yet he would still be in the game but if you had the latest update then he got replaced with an ordinary original character instead.
Yeah it's a shame. I'm glad companies make the small alterations rather than not releasing the game though. I would rather have a pink Spiderman than no Revenge of Shinobi lol.
This was a good one. Wii VC is still my preferred way to play most first-party N64 games until I get around to buying an N64+EverDrive. It doesn't support everything (even with injected roms), but man, what it does play, it plays really, *really* well.
Very true. I could be wrong, but I believe virtual console does have better N64 emulation than real hardware if you don't use an upscaler or a console mod.
@@pojr Everything runs at either 480p or 480i depending on your Wii settings, so the 3D graphics are crisper, and I think it does tend to run a little smoother than real hardware would. Downside is, IIRC in a couple of MK64 levels and I think maybe the Star Fox 64 multiplayer mode, whatever physical real hardware bottleneck they relied on to set the speed on a real N64 wasn't there and they run a little TOO fast. Not unplayably so, but you do notice the speed difference.
I have N64 games for both the real N64 and the Wii. Generally, I prefer playing on the Wii, as it supports GameCube controllers, and the 480p video output (despite very few N64 games taking full advantage of this) looks great.
For the Revenge of Shinobi's case, the Virtual Console version was not altered, it just used the latest version of Revenge of Shinobi. The game had like 5 or 6 versions each altering some form of contents or another. Virtual Console just ported the latest one from those.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the last Revenge of Shinobi update was on 6-Pak, which still had the licensed Spiderman. The pink sprite-swap was a change that was made for virtual console. I don't believe the pink sprite was on any copies before VC.
Nintendo was putting most of their focus on WiiWare stuff instead at that point, I think. It did get a bit of a second wind in there with some Genesis stuff and a handful of SNES Squaresoft titles I think around 2011-12?, but it was never the Wednesday bonanza it used to be
It's actually interesting that Donkey Kong country was optimized for PAL regions because Rare was a British company, so they probably either better understood the conversion from NSTC to PAL region, or they initially made the game to run on PAL hardware, would be interesting to find out
While there are disappointment when it comes to some VC games due to lack of qol and safe states, some games does had enhancements or extra features not found in the original. For one a lot of the NeoGeo games on there are AES games and had memory card save support so you could exit from the game and return back to that exact part of the game without restarting. Games like Super Street Fighter II for the Sega Genesis (and not the Super NES version) had online play through a PvP server which is still going on if you still had the game on Wii VC. Also if you download Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic and Knuckles you could use a lock-on feature that link those games to S&K and play Knuckles in Sonic 2, Blue Sphere, and Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Also something to note is that while Star Fox and Star Fox 64 were both called Starwing and Lylat Wars in their original cartridge release for Europe, in Virtual Console they go by their North American title instead though the NES, Super NES, and Genesis Contra games are still called Probotector.
The Virtual Console was effectively a section of the Nintendo Wii Shop Channel that sold emulation ROM images bundled with custom emulators. These emulators were bare bones, being configured only for each individual game, as opposed to all games for a given console. The aim was to deliver a 1:1 gameplay experience, opting to go the route of how the game functioned on original hardware. This would be seen with the release of Starfox 64, as that Virtual Console release would receive an update to add the framerate issues that were missing from its original release on the service. While some licensed games would see release on the platform, the one noted in the video was subject to a more interesting case. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally developed and published by Konami for the NES. However, Konami wouldn't hang onto the license, as it would change hands multiple times. When the Virtual Console was in operation, Ubisoft actually had the console publishing rights for TMNT video games. This would prevent other companies from releasing anything for any platform, including previously released titles on newer platforms. With the 2007 release of the computer-animated TMNT movie, Ubisoft would work with Konami on a sublicensing deal, allowing them to release the NES game on the service, though featuring a 100 point price increase due to the additional publishing license.
Yeah, with the exception of the priced-up "import" titles, TMNT1 was the only North America-release NES game on the Wii Shop Channel priced at 600 Wii Points ($6 US) instead of 500.
Revenge of shinobi had a copyright nightmare with the characters that where used in the game infact their are five different version of Revenge of shinobi
It really goes to show blindingly stupid the entire licensing system is. Since these games were existing works and not new ones, they should have been regarded as such, with no new/updated license required, preserving all vintage titles as they originally were.
That would actually be pretty interesting, if you were allowed to release original games that have licensed properties, even if the company doesn't have the license anymore, as long as nothing else about the game was changed
@@pojr That's how it should be, and appears to be the case with movies and such (from what I can find, films don't need to be relicensed when they come out on DVD, Blu-ray, VHS, etc, for example.)
@@szr8The early home video releases of Wayne’s World didn’t have the original Stairway To Heaven joke, and it was only until recently did they just relicense to include it for the joke.
I had a ton of Virtual Console games on Wii, I loved the service. The implementation on 3DS was alright but for whatever reason Nintendo dropped the ball hard on Wii U and the NES/SNES/N64 emulators had a notoriously bad input delay that severely hurt the experience for a lot of people :(
I always thought the virtual console was too expensive. They did little to nothing to enhance the games which is sad considering emulation was available that did enhance the games. You also had to get a special controller if you wanted to play SNES/N64 games. $5 for a nes rom is a rip off.
Yeah, but most VC games in PAL run at 50Hz outside TurboGrafx-16 and most import titles outside the Mega Drive can run in 60Hz. NES and SNES games on 3DS VC are all running in NTSC versions with a few exceptions. PAL Wii U has 50Hz and 60Hz modes. Most of us use the 60Hz mode anyway. Most NTSC HDTVs nowadays support 50Hz.
@@PKMNwww411_MkII Makes sense the TG16 is NTSC only, since it more or less never came out in PAL in 90's; there technically were some systems brought to UK as the system was dying in US and had shoddy conversions to 50hz done, but they didn't sell any games besides pack-in Keith Courage. They made WAY too many for USA launch; amusingly, Hudson Soft actually made bank on that - they had a weird license with NEC, where NEC would pay them for each console they built, before NEC would make their money selling them. *oops*
Funny you didnt mention the original arcade shinobi, which also contained a spiderman-like enemy that climbs on walls and jumps down when you get close...... in most rereleases, the red parts of the sprite were recolored green or yellow. The Sega Ages version also replaces the Marilyn Monroe posters on mission 1-2 with a portrait of the werewolf from Altered Beast
Emulation on consoles is only a great service for those that don't know anything about emulation on a PC. The PC emulators are more accurate and are free. As for ROMs and ISOs, only if you own a physical copy of the game. But people still get them anyways. The best part about playing retro games on PC is that not only is the emulation better than on any console, but there are patches to fix bugs, add new features, add or replace music & graphics, and even play online with someone else or multiple people. The best part is that you don;t have to worry about it going away unlike the console services that get shut down after a few years. Completely beats anything on the virtual console or the PSN network.
Glad that the NES, Snes and Genesis emulators for Wii are very good and have the same graphic quality than VC. In a CRT tv with video component are amazing, similar to RGB signal.
Great idea for a video! I remember when they first announced the VC on the Wii, I made a spreadsheet that night of all the games I wanted, how much they'd cost, and how much I'd have to save to buy them all 😂
The N64 games running in Black and White is probably a TV issue, I know when my brother had a PS2, games that had a 50/60hz option ran in Black and White at 60hz, colour at 50hz. Apparently the PS2 just sent a NTSC signal to the TV, when the TV is looking for PAL colour information, not NTSC. Gamecube and later consoles used PAL60 instead of sending an NTSC signal to the TV. I would assume the N64 games on VC were doing the same. Not sure why that would happen with an emulator though.
As an Australian wii owner, it shocks me to hear that America got the Commodore 64, had this been available over here my mother probably would’ve used the wii
The virtual console was basically a modernised version of the dream library on the dreamcast, dreamcast had downloadable megadrive & PC engine games in the 2000-01 that almost nobody knew about because of the discontinuation. Also I don't understand why the wii virtual console had C64 games that were never re-released on the wii u & 3ds virtual console or why Nintendo couldn't be bothered to allow you to carry your virtual console library from one system to the other 😒🤦🏿
I never knew about the speed difference growing up and it would have been close to impossible to know before internet days. I only remember hearing megaman 1 in more recent times and it sounded so different and that's when I caught up on the whole technical aspect of it. Of course these days I always prefer NTSC as it feels like the "proper" way, despite having grown up with 50hz. At least they should have had the option for players but nintendo being nintendo I guess. This is why I also really like emulators and mister these days as you can customize your game in so many ways, just the way you like it to be. As for the downgrading/removing content from games this I really dislike. I can understand the legal aspect of it but changing aspects of a game removes a bit of the original spirit every time. Imagine if we didn't have people making copies(roms) of old games at all. We'd have little to no idea about the gaming past. There are so many obscure consoles out there that would have faded away if not for emulators.
The 50hz and 60hz stuff are different by regions only, it's not a feature or something you could just flip with a switch. By bringing 60hz games to be play on 50hz refresh rate you will get a wonky game as the game was not design with 50hz in mind. It's like putting fish on fresh or salt water. You put fresh water fish on salt water and they die due to contamination, you put salt water fish on fresh water and they got sick and die cause they are allergic to the clean environment. You can't just flip salt water to become fresh water or vice-versa, both are naturally preserve in their own way on Earth, same for 50hz and 60hz signal.
Yeah the original versions are almost always better. Of course I would rather have real spiderman than the pink sprite-swap. With that said, I would rather have those changes then not have the game be released at all.
10:23 and some games like SMB were released unoptimised and then received an 'optimised' version. If I remember correctly my PAL copy of SMB has slightly faster music than the NTSC release and also allows you to jump slightly higher.
“Why not just give us everything?” Licensing. Music in particular is a pain in the ASS for Japanese games, because music licensing laws in Japan give way more power to the artist. But also just regional licensing. Not every company handled their own distribution for each region. You’d need to go through those distributors who still own rights and get their permission and pay them a cut. Then there’s the local laws - you couldn’t sell Contra in Germany, it has to be the Probotector version, for example. And if you can’t sell something in one country in the EU, you can’t sell it in *any* country in the EU, I believe their laws go. Then there’s the problem of languages - gotta do German, English, French, Spanish translations...and finally, because the Wii isn’t an HDMI console, and the emulation isn’t great, there may be problems with 50hz PAL. There’s marginally less reason for the US, but licensing is still a major factor, along with certain games simply being unplayable unless you know Japanese.
You forgot the most important change they made in Punch Out. They took out Mike Tyson and replaced him with Mr Dream, who is ludistically equal but a different sprite.
That change wasn't _just_ a Virtual Console thing; that happened with later prints of the cartridge also as well because Nintendo's contract with Mike Tyson had expired by that point.
There were two versions of Punch-Out for the NES, one is called Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! while the other one is just called Punch-Out!!. The one used for Virtual Console was the Punch-Out!! one. The reason Nintendo ended contract with Mike Tyson back then was cause of the lawsuit by his girlfriend accusing Tyson of beating her up. Nintendo want no drama from the lawsuit so they ended contract with Tyson ending their short relationship with the boxing champion before he went to work with WWF on the Stone Cold Steve Austin storyline. The lawsuit thing was also the reason why Capcom swap names in their SFII games with M. Bison (Mike Bison) as Balrog, Balrog as Vega, and Vega as M. Bison. Capcom feared that once Tyson lose money from the lawsuit he would had gone after them for making their boxer M. Bison too similar to his likeness. Fortunately Tyson did mention that he wouldn't go after them cause no copyright was ever infringe originally as Mike was already an established character in Street Fighter 1 (a game which was also on the Virtual Console).
@@VOAN yes I have the Turbo Grafx version of Street Fighter 1 for the Wii Virtual Console. And I can't do Dragon punches, psycho fires and hurricane kicks in the TG16 SF 1 if my life depended on it. And I could do them somewhat well in SF1 on SF30th for Xbox and Switch, and that's a hard game to do it in
seems the only way to be sure is emulating on your pc. also best thing i ever did to my snes was have it modded to output 60hz and in RGB too so looked even better than ntsc or pal
Territories and licensing agreements have made a mess of what games get released where and what they look like, for many decades. And of course different TV standards with different resolutions and refresh rates have always been an issue. HD television has mostly fixed this but there are still issues.
Best 'vrtual console' is MISTer FPGA. It has most games which run as close to original as possible (especially in time domain) and has amazing scaler. You can also connect old CRT and experience games as they were intended to be ran - even including composite output. It pretty much beats any emulation box and definitely something like making emulation box from small ARM computers.
To be fair the whole spider man thing... while that was in the JP version and some US versions, he was already changed by the time it hit Europe. Nintendo just ran with it.
One of my buddies for the longest time has tried to convince me that Mario Kart 64 is different than the original game on the N64, I don't see the difference
Me: "Emulation isn't perfect!! If you want the PERFECT experience, use a real console!" Them: "And what's your proof?" Me: *shows video* Nice work!! Also 12K already?!? We might hit 20k by the end of the year! Edit: The pitch thing was only a thing for the NES. It was because the CPU and sound chip were the same chip. Why nintendo didn't use 1.77 mhz like everyone else for PAL timings is beyond me- Even SEGA used this (would translate to 3.54 mhz for SMS & SG1000 or 7.6 mhz for genesis)
"it'd be nice if there was an option to remove the borders or increase the speed." buddy... that's not how that works. they'd need to have seperate ROMs for that. for instance, resolution is switched on the Mega Drive through a bit in a hardware register iirc. besides, such a blanket alteration would require additional playtesting to make sure nothing breaks.
Donkey Kong Country was developed by Rare, a british company. It’s not “optimised”, it was made for PAL. and the original Super Mario Bros *WAS* PAL optimised. Or at least, the second revision and the one used on Wii VC. Also Mega Man is terrible on everything lmao
The worst they did, and I guess it was more on Wii U than Wii, was the brightness adjustments. I get it was a quick and easy way to get around modern epilepsy standards but it looks awful.
Behind the scenes word was, whenever a publisher wanted to update a game, add levels cut from the original cartridge release (Super Turrican), or fix regional quirks on imports (Ufouria's music PCM samples being optimized for its actual PAL released version so the Wii release sounded awful -- Nintendo wouldn't let them use the NTSC ROM because it didn't get a retail release), Nintendo was pretty consistent that the game HAD to have been released, and it HAD to be the same version that was released, more or less. It does seem like exceptions were usually only made for epilepsy protection or to cut out authorized/questionable IP usage (e.g., no more Kawasaki banners in Wave Race). There were a handful of VC games with internal patches. It does seem like Nintendo were maybe a little more liberal with M2's Sega VC releases, with them fixing a glitch or two in Phantasy Star IV, and they did get to fully translate Monster World IV and Wonder Boy in Monster Land for the first time, though that was at the tail end of the Virtual Console, so I'm not sure if Nintendo was as bothered with consistent rules on them at that point.
@ this was a month ago so my memory is hazy but iirc there’s a part in the video where he leaves out the name of a company in his script for “copyright reasons”… it just felt silly
I'm not trying to bash you here, but improve your videos. You end most of your sentences as if they were questions. It's quite annoying and I stopped watching because of it.
This video is riddled with assumptions, half-truths, and incorrect statements. I would like to see you succeed on UA-cam, but it would be wise to put a bit more work into your writing.
@pojr I’m tryina DM you because I have a cool gift I’d like to send you. Do you have any kinda thingy like a Patreon, discord, or something where I can reach you? Thanks for making awesome retro gaming videos!
"Revenge of Shinobi" is the most interesting one. That game had 5 versions; 1.00 through 1.04, with the first four alone hitting the Genesis. It was a mess of copyright and licensing issues. Not just Spiderman, but Rambo, Batman, Godzilla, Terminator. And on top of that, they started off as imposter characters, then some characters got officially licensed later, only to have the license not just gone again, but with some of the characters getting redrawn, which is where pink Spidey comes in.
And as I think of it, "Pink Spider" is a song by a Japanese singer named Hide. He is no longer alive, but I have to wonder if the Pink Spiderman might be a reference.
Yeah the story behind revenge of shinobi is really cool. I'd love to make a video on that. Getting the footage for this game was difficult because there's no level select code or anything. Had to play through the game legit to get the Spider-Man footage, and that was quite the task considering how difficult this game is.
@@pojr Make that video
When I bought the Sega CD, it came with a cd with Genesis games, including Revenge of Shinobi. The tom in that cd had already altered all the licensed characters. It was disappointing because I played the original version when it came out.
@@pojrif you use the unlimited shuriken code in the beginning, the game becomes much easier.
Pretty stoked to have the original version.
The Virtual Console version of Shadow Dancer on the Genesis has the World Trade Center removed from the title screen, though not the ending bizarrely!
But Nintendo got really lazy with the virtual console on the Wii U, several of the games are literally ROMs taken from a download site, as they still contain the original ROM name and even the hackers credit in the code!
Not to mention games seemed very dark. Like, very noticeably. It seemed weird how games looked and ran better on Wii than the next gen system that had architecture inside it.
@@bubbythebear6891 Nintendo are terrible with their in house emulators, Look at how bad the Mario 64 Switch version is compared to fan works!
A wild Guru Larry has appeared! Hello you!
I remember playing Sin and Punishment on the Wii Virtual console (Which was a Japan exclusive Nintendo 64 game that was only localized through the virtual console service.)
There's a mission that takes place in New York in 2017 in which the city is attacked by a kaiju monster.
I liked the game so I bought a real catridge.
And one change I noticed was that the original release had a destroyed world trade center on the skybox in one cutscene where in the Wii Virtual console version It didn't.
The game originally came out in 2000, one year before. 9/11
Revenge of Shinobi on VC also changed the title screen. It was originally a(n unlicensed) image of Sonny Chiba. For VC, they replaced him with a guy who works for M2, who did the Genesis emulation for VC.
The biggest problem that I have with the Virtual Console was that the games you bought would be stuck on the system, with no way to transfer them to another unit. If something happened to your Wii, you were pretty much out of luck unless you send the system to Nintendo for repair. Contrast this with the Xbox 360, where you could use a special transfer cable to bring your XBLA games and other stuff to another unit. PS3 allows you to have your digital games on up to 2 systems (5 systems earlier in its life.)
You could try copying the vc channels onto an sd and putting it onto a new wii
Not to mention the NES didn't really sell well in Europe due to the massive amount of 8 bit home computing competition Nintendo had to go against. Especially in the UK where nintendo's games sold at 30-40 british pounds a pop when you can get 6-8 ZX spectrum tape games for the same amount of $. What was a british parent going to buy for their kids? The ZX ofc.
Makes me wonder why they didn't make that a platform on EU Virtual Console... I mean, JP had the MSX, the US had the C64, why didn't you guys get anything like that?
@@JSRphones Oh I'm not European, I'm a yank, but i have friends from the UK.
Big new games on the ZX Spectrum were £10 each, but if yo wanted budget, you could get them for as cheap as £1.99, plus magazines would give away a bunch of full games for free on the cover!
But the NES was really a rich kids toy in the UK, Mattel royally screwed up distribution and charged ridiculous prices for some games, I remember seeing Festers Quest and Star Wars for £80. You could buy THREE full priced Master System games even for that price!
Nintendo games were considerably more righteous.
The UK got C64 and TurboGfx* games on VC, along with the more popular consoles.
I would have liked a ZX Spectrum section too, but it was probably too hard to find rights holders these days.
I mean we got NeoGeo too, and hardly anyone owned one, maybe played an arcade, but nobody had the home version.
*Probably named PC Engine , I can't remember.@@JSRphones
I am the proud owner of the slow PAL Sonic the Hedgehog on my Wii U after the Wii to Wii U transfere. However, if you purchased the Wii to Wii U VC upgraded games, some were actually "converted" to the NTSC version. I believe that the ones you bought on the 3DS VC e-store in Europe on the other hand was actually only the NTSC versions. Ideally, they should just have given people in all regions the option to chose which version you wanted to play when booting up the game.
PAL TVs since mid 80s are actually perfectly capable of displaying 60hz with NTSC line and frame timings but PAL colour, since PAL colour carrier actually sits higher in the frequency spectrum and the channels are wider, giving extra room for the base video (luminance) and control signals.
But it's technically a standard violation so game console companies were a little hesitant to make use of that. Except most Dreamcast games have a 60Hz mode.
Though typical 240-ish line progressive mode that all 8/16bit consoles used in NTSC is non standard as well, because it uses an even total number of lines instead of odd and the half line offset of the second field is missing, so all timings are a little tortured to fit.
60Hz was indeed quickly adopted but actual NTSC color compatibility took a while. Even 2 Trinitrons I've tested from 1991 and 1997 do not have NTSC from the get-go and require soldering+service menu commands to enable them. Thankfully a portion of the NTSC systems used RGB output ontop of composite: RGB completely bypasses the old color systems and goes color on any TV with RGB input, which most early european TVs had access to. However an NTSC N64 won't be able to have that luxury being stuck on composite output.
NTSC compatible CRTs would begin to show up in the mid-90s but were the most expensive models ( Sony Super Trinitrons ), and would only become affordable at the start of the 3rd millenia, when they started appearing in grey and silver shells.
It´s a problem with all digital gaming. GTA games were downgraded with updates, removing songs for copyright, even after you paid for the game with those songs.
Yup, my Xbox one wouldn’t allow me to play my digital game GTA San Andreas due to an update so I took the console offline and was able to play it. I haven’t played it in a while so not sure if that can still be achieved that way tho
Yeap and it happen as recently too as Jirard the Completionist was just removed from Sea of Stars. If you hadn't updated the game yet he would still be in the game but if you had the latest update then he got replaced with an ordinary original character instead.
Yeah it's a shame. I'm glad companies make the small alterations rather than not releasing the game though. I would rather have a pink Spiderman than no Revenge of Shinobi lol.
@@VOAN well that guy ran a fake charity
This was a good one. Wii VC is still my preferred way to play most first-party N64 games until I get around to buying an N64+EverDrive. It doesn't support everything (even with injected roms), but man, what it does play, it plays really, *really* well.
Very true. I could be wrong, but I believe virtual console does have better N64 emulation than real hardware if you don't use an upscaler or a console mod.
@@pojr Everything runs at either 480p or 480i depending on your Wii settings, so the 3D graphics are crisper, and I think it does tend to run a little smoother than real hardware would. Downside is, IIRC in a couple of MK64 levels and I think maybe the Star Fox 64 multiplayer mode, whatever physical real hardware bottleneck they relied on to set the speed on a real N64 wasn't there and they run a little TOO fast. Not unplayably so, but you do notice the speed difference.
I have N64 games for both the real N64 and the Wii. Generally, I prefer playing on the Wii, as it supports GameCube controllers, and the 480p video output (despite very few N64 games taking full advantage of this) looks great.
For the Revenge of Shinobi's case, the Virtual Console version was not altered, it just used the latest version of Revenge of Shinobi. The game had like 5 or 6 versions each altering some form of contents or another. Virtual Console just ported the latest one from those.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the last Revenge of Shinobi update was on 6-Pak, which still had the licensed Spiderman. The pink sprite-swap was a change that was made for virtual console. I don't believe the pink sprite was on any copies before VC.
No joke, Virtual Console is what got me to buy a Wii.
For me, virtual console was the main reason to have a Wii. I didn't have a huge collection of actual Wii games.
I think I was as excited about Super Castlevania IV as I was Super Mario Galaxy
ah virtual console, those were the days. great retrospective pojr!
Thank you!
Somewhere in 2010, we started getting less virtual console games by getting 1 a week.
Nintendo was putting most of their focus on WiiWare stuff instead at that point, I think. It did get a bit of a second wind in there with some Genesis stuff and a handful of SNES Squaresoft titles I think around 2011-12?, but it was never the Wednesday bonanza it used to be
It's actually interesting that Donkey Kong country was optimized for PAL regions because Rare was a British company, so they probably either better understood the conversion from NSTC to PAL region, or they initially made the game to run on PAL hardware, would be interesting to find out
While there are disappointment when it comes to some VC games due to lack of qol and safe states, some games does had enhancements or extra features not found in the original. For one a lot of the NeoGeo games on there are AES games and had memory card save support so you could exit from the game and return back to that exact part of the game without restarting. Games like Super Street Fighter II for the Sega Genesis (and not the Super NES version) had online play through a PvP server which is still going on if you still had the game on Wii VC. Also if you download Sonic 1, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, and Sonic and Knuckles you could use a lock-on feature that link those games to S&K and play Knuckles in Sonic 2, Blue Sphere, and Sonic 3 and Knuckles. Also something to note is that while Star Fox and Star Fox 64 were both called Starwing and Lylat Wars in their original cartridge release for Europe, in Virtual Console they go by their North American title instead though the NES, Super NES, and Genesis Contra games are still called Probotector.
The Virtual Console was effectively a section of the Nintendo Wii Shop Channel that sold emulation ROM images bundled with custom emulators. These emulators were bare bones, being configured only for each individual game, as opposed to all games for a given console. The aim was to deliver a 1:1 gameplay experience, opting to go the route of how the game functioned on original hardware. This would be seen with the release of Starfox 64, as that Virtual Console release would receive an update to add the framerate issues that were missing from its original release on the service.
While some licensed games would see release on the platform, the one noted in the video was subject to a more interesting case. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally developed and published by Konami for the NES. However, Konami wouldn't hang onto the license, as it would change hands multiple times. When the Virtual Console was in operation, Ubisoft actually had the console publishing rights for TMNT video games. This would prevent other companies from releasing anything for any platform, including previously released titles on newer platforms. With the 2007 release of the computer-animated TMNT movie, Ubisoft would work with Konami on a sublicensing deal, allowing them to release the NES game on the service, though featuring a 100 point price increase due to the additional publishing license.
Yeah, with the exception of the priced-up "import" titles, TMNT1 was the only North America-release NES game on the Wii Shop Channel priced at 600 Wii Points ($6 US) instead of 500.
Revenge of shinobi had a copyright nightmare with the characters that where used in the game infact their are five different version of Revenge of shinobi
It really goes to show blindingly stupid the entire licensing system is.
Since these games were existing works and not new ones, they should have been regarded as such, with no new/updated license required, preserving all vintage titles as they originally were.
That would actually be pretty interesting, if you were allowed to release original games that have licensed properties, even if the company doesn't have the license anymore, as long as nothing else about the game was changed
@@pojr That's how it should be, and appears to be the case with movies and such (from what I can find, films don't need to be relicensed when they come out on DVD, Blu-ray, VHS, etc, for example.)
@@szr8The early home video releases of Wayne’s World didn’t have the original Stairway To Heaven joke, and it was only until recently did they just relicense to include it for the joke.
I had a ton of Virtual Console games on Wii, I loved the service. The implementation on 3DS was alright but for whatever reason Nintendo dropped the ball hard on Wii U and the NES/SNES/N64 emulators had a notoriously bad input delay that severely hurt the experience for a lot of people :(
I always thought the virtual console was too expensive. They did little to nothing to enhance the games which is sad considering emulation was available that did enhance the games. You also had to get a special controller if you wanted to play SNES/N64 games. $5 for a nes rom is a rip off.
The EU Wii has a 60Hz mode, too
Yeah, but most VC games in PAL run at 50Hz outside TurboGrafx-16 and most import titles outside the Mega Drive can run in 60Hz.
NES and SNES games on 3DS VC are all running in NTSC versions with a few exceptions.
PAL Wii U has 50Hz and 60Hz modes. Most of us use the 60Hz mode anyway. Most NTSC HDTVs nowadays support 50Hz.
@@PKMNwww411_MkII Makes sense the TG16 is NTSC only, since it more or less never came out in PAL in 90's; there technically were some systems brought to UK as the system was dying in US and had shoddy conversions to 50hz done, but they didn't sell any games besides pack-in Keith Courage. They made WAY too many for USA launch; amusingly, Hudson Soft actually made bank on that - they had a weird license with NEC, where NEC would pay them for each console they built, before NEC would make their money selling them.
*oops*
Funny you didnt mention the original arcade shinobi, which also contained a spiderman-like enemy that climbs on walls and jumps down when you get close...... in most rereleases, the red parts of the sprite were recolored green or yellow. The Sega Ages version also replaces the Marilyn Monroe posters on mission 1-2 with a portrait of the werewolf from Altered Beast
A Wii fan from Europe so...super mario bros 3 was also improved on the original release and reused on the Wii and feels better
Emulation on consoles is only a great service for those that don't know anything about emulation on a PC. The PC emulators are more accurate and are free. As for ROMs and ISOs, only if you own a physical copy of the game. But people still get them anyways. The best part about playing retro games on PC is that not only is the emulation better than on any console, but there are patches to fix bugs, add new features, add or replace music & graphics, and even play online with someone else or multiple people. The best part is that you don;t have to worry about it going away unlike the console services that get shut down after a few years. Completely beats anything on the virtual console or the PSN network.
Glad that the NES, Snes and Genesis emulators for Wii are very good and have the same graphic quality than VC. In a CRT tv with video component are amazing, similar to RGB signal.
Great video as always pojr - keep up the good work 😊
Thank you!
Great idea for a video! I remember when they first announced the VC on the Wii, I made a spreadsheet that night of all the games I wanted, how much they'd cost, and how much I'd have to save to buy them all 😂
Thank you!
Licensing was never a problem on physical media.
The N64 games running in Black and White is probably a TV issue, I know when my brother had a PS2, games that had a 50/60hz option ran in Black and White at 60hz, colour at 50hz.
Apparently the PS2 just sent a NTSC signal to the TV, when the TV is looking for PAL colour information, not NTSC. Gamecube and later consoles used PAL60 instead of sending an NTSC signal to the TV. I would assume the N64 games on VC were doing the same. Not sure why that would happen with an emulator though.
I didn't get into digital downloads until the switch but essentially is the same thing
As an Australian wii owner, it shocks me to hear that America got the Commodore 64, had this been available over here my mother probably would’ve used the wii
3:12 Help them!
The virtual console was basically a modernised version of the dream library on the dreamcast, dreamcast had downloadable megadrive & PC engine games in the 2000-01 that almost nobody knew about because of the discontinuation.
Also I don't understand why the wii virtual console had C64 games that were never re-released on the wii u & 3ds virtual console or why Nintendo couldn't be bothered to allow you to carry your virtual console library from one system to the other 😒🤦🏿
They removed a couple frames from Squawks and Glimmer in DKC 1&2 to prevent their lights from flashing on the screen. It was a good move.
I never knew about the speed difference growing up and it would have been close to impossible to know before internet days. I only remember hearing megaman 1 in more recent times and it sounded so different and that's when I caught up on the whole technical aspect of it. Of course these days I always prefer NTSC as it feels like the "proper" way, despite having grown up with 50hz. At least they should have had the option for players but nintendo being nintendo I guess. This is why I also really like emulators and mister these days as you can customize your game in so many ways, just the way you like it to be.
As for the downgrading/removing content from games this I really dislike. I can understand the legal aspect of it but changing aspects of a game removes a bit of the original spirit every time. Imagine if we didn't have people making copies(roms) of old games at all. We'd have little to no idea about the gaming past. There are so many obscure consoles out there that would have faded away if not for emulators.
The 50hz and 60hz stuff are different by regions only, it's not a feature or something you could just flip with a switch. By bringing 60hz games to be play on 50hz refresh rate you will get a wonky game as the game was not design with 50hz in mind. It's like putting fish on fresh or salt water. You put fresh water fish on salt water and they die due to contamination, you put salt water fish on fresh water and they got sick and die cause they are allergic to the clean environment. You can't just flip salt water to become fresh water or vice-versa, both are naturally preserve in their own way on Earth, same for 50hz and 60hz signal.
As someone who grew up in an NTSC region, I didn't know either until I did some research.
Dude's channel better blow up soon!
Great video.
Thanks!
very intersting video, as usual..thanks
This is why I prefer playing the original versions. I hate the changes they made.
Yeah the original versions are almost always better. Of course I would rather have real spiderman than the pink sprite-swap. With that said, I would rather have those changes then not have the game be released at all.
10:23 and some games like SMB were released unoptimised and then received an 'optimised' version. If I remember correctly my PAL copy of SMB has slightly faster music than the NTSC release and also allows you to jump slightly higher.
Bro is so good at Puyo Puyo
“Why not just give us everything?” Licensing. Music in particular is a pain in the ASS for Japanese games, because music licensing laws in Japan give way more power to the artist. But also just regional licensing. Not every company handled their own distribution for each region. You’d need to go through those distributors who still own rights and get their permission and pay them a cut.
Then there’s the local laws - you couldn’t sell Contra in Germany, it has to be the Probotector version, for example. And if you can’t sell something in one country in the EU, you can’t sell it in *any* country in the EU, I believe their laws go. Then there’s the problem of languages - gotta do German, English, French, Spanish translations...and finally, because the Wii isn’t an HDMI console, and the emulation isn’t great, there may be problems with 50hz PAL.
There’s marginally less reason for the US, but licensing is still a major factor, along with certain games simply being unplayable unless you know Japanese.
You forgot the most important change they made in Punch Out. They took out Mike Tyson and replaced him with Mr Dream, who is ludistically equal but a different sprite.
That change wasn't _just_ a Virtual Console thing; that happened with later prints of the cartridge also as well because Nintendo's contract with Mike Tyson had expired by that point.
There were two versions of Punch-Out for the NES, one is called Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! while the other one is just called Punch-Out!!. The one used for Virtual Console was the Punch-Out!! one. The reason Nintendo ended contract with Mike Tyson back then was cause of the lawsuit by his girlfriend accusing Tyson of beating her up. Nintendo want no drama from the lawsuit so they ended contract with Tyson ending their short relationship with the boxing champion before he went to work with WWF on the Stone Cold Steve Austin storyline. The lawsuit thing was also the reason why Capcom swap names in their SFII games with M. Bison (Mike Bison) as Balrog, Balrog as Vega, and Vega as M. Bison. Capcom feared that once Tyson lose money from the lawsuit he would had gone after them for making their boxer M. Bison too similar to his likeness. Fortunately Tyson did mention that he wouldn't go after them cause no copyright was ever infringe originally as Mike was already an established character in Street Fighter 1 (a game which was also on the Virtual Console).
@@VOAN yes I have the Turbo Grafx version of Street Fighter 1 for the Wii Virtual Console.
And I can't do Dragon punches, psycho fires and hurricane kicks in the TG16 SF 1 if my life depended on it. And I could do them somewhat well in SF1 on SF30th for Xbox and Switch, and that's a hard game to do it in
@@VOAN Punch Out came first. There was no cancellation of contacts. Whoever said that made it up.
@@VOAN But it turned out when Mike Tyson found out "Balrog" was based on him, he actually found the humor in it.
seems the only way to be sure is emulating on your pc. also best thing i ever did to my snes was have it modded to output 60hz and in RGB too so looked even better than ntsc or pal
Territories and licensing agreements have made a mess of what games get released where and what they look like, for many decades. And of course different TV standards with different resolutions and refresh rates have always been an issue. HD television has mostly fixed this but there are still issues.
Really no problem except n. Stopped it.
Best 'vrtual console' is MISTer FPGA. It has most games which run as close to original as possible (especially in time domain) and has amazing scaler. You can also connect old CRT and experience games as they were intended to be ran - even including composite output. It pretty much beats any emulation box and definitely something like making emulation box from small ARM computers.
659 virtual games released in Japan. 59 Game and Watches released in Japan. COINCIDENCE??? Yeah probably.
Lol you bring up a good point.
Hello POJR 👋🤓 great video with info 👍🏼 keep up the good work brother 👏 God bless you and yours bud 🙏🏻😇 Nostalgic ✨🆒😎
Thank you so much!
i love your smile
So sad that the Wii shop is closed, l have so many games l missed ! Wished Nintendo would bring it back for a least a week !
To be fair the whole spider man thing... while that was in the JP version and some US versions, he was already changed by the time it hit Europe. Nintendo just ran with it.
One of my buddies for the longest time has tried to convince me that Mario Kart 64 is different than the original game on the N64, I don't see the difference
With a modded Wii they can be installed and a PAL Wii can be changed to NTSC too. Emulators also work great but N64 VC games run better.
Me: "Emulation isn't perfect!! If you want the PERFECT experience, use a real console!"
Them: "And what's your proof?"
Me: *shows video*
Nice work!! Also 12K already?!? We might hit 20k by the end of the year!
Edit: The pitch thing was only a thing for the NES. It was because the CPU and sound chip were the same chip. Why nintendo didn't use 1.77 mhz like everyone else for PAL timings is beyond me- Even SEGA used this (would translate to 3.54 mhz for SMS & SG1000 or 7.6 mhz for genesis)
your style becomes more and more professional
well done
Thank you so much!
You're a guy, accept and love yourself how you are
"it'd be nice if there was an option to remove the borders or increase the speed." buddy... that's not how that works. they'd need to have seperate ROMs for that. for instance, resolution is switched on the Mega Drive through a bit in a hardware register iirc.
besides, such a blanket alteration would require additional playtesting to make sure nothing breaks.
Thank God for Emulation 💗💎💗
Donkey Kong Country was developed by Rare, a british company. It’s not “optimised”, it was made for PAL. and the original Super Mario Bros *WAS* PAL optimised. Or at least, the second revision and the one used on Wii VC.
Also Mega Man is terrible on everything lmao
Let GOOOOOOOOO! New Vid!!
Glad I can deliver!
The worst they did, and I guess it was more on Wii U than Wii, was the brightness adjustments. I get it was a quick and easy way to get around modern epilepsy standards but it looks awful.
“there’s no way to add scanlines” my boy it is a wii just plug it into your crt
4:54 "Virtual console is supposed to give you an unchanged experience."
Where did you get this "fact"? Why do you think this is true?
Behind the scenes word was, whenever a publisher wanted to update a game, add levels cut from the original cartridge release (Super Turrican), or fix regional quirks on imports (Ufouria's music PCM samples being optimized for its actual PAL released version so the Wii release sounded awful -- Nintendo wouldn't let them use the NTSC ROM because it didn't get a retail release), Nintendo was pretty consistent that the game HAD to have been released, and it HAD to be the same version that was released, more or less.
It does seem like exceptions were usually only made for epilepsy protection or to cut out authorized/questionable IP usage (e.g., no more Kawasaki banners in Wave Race). There were a handful of VC games with internal patches. It does seem like Nintendo were maybe a little more liberal with M2's Sega VC releases, with them fixing a glitch or two in Phantasy Star IV, and they did get to fully translate Monster World IV and Wonder Boy in Monster Land for the first time, though that was at the tail end of the Virtual Console, so I'm not sure if Nintendo was as bothered with consistent rules on them at that point.
@@evenmorebetter what you said is completely untrue. Nintendo even modified its own games for virtual console.
@@Rhetorical346 Cool thanks
@@evenmorebetter No problem, happy to educate you.
Nice vid but £31 for some crappy generic £5 sliders... NO
Thanks pogr
bro it’s not violating copyright to say the name of a corporation 😭 what? i doubt even in japan
If you mean the NHK in Punchout then it's licensing
@ this was a month ago so my memory is hazy but iirc there’s a part in the video where he leaves out the name of a company in his script for “copyright reasons”… it just felt silly
massive cult following is an oxymoron.
Virtual console is probably the worst for game preservation.
I'm not trying to bash you here, but improve your videos. You end most of your sentences as if they were questions. It's quite annoying and I stopped watching because of it.
growing up I never understood the virtual console when you could get everything online for free.
This video is riddled with assumptions, half-truths, and incorrect statements. I would like to see you succeed on UA-cam, but it would be wise to put a bit more work into your writing.
@pojr I’m tryina DM you because I have a cool gift I’d like to send you. Do you have any kinda thingy like a Patreon, discord, or something where I can reach you? Thanks for making awesome retro gaming videos!
MSX is not a console.