Games That Need to Come to the Nintendo eShop August 21, 2012

Nintendo’s hardware as of late has been offering a lot of new retail options to their customers. Part of the reason why I bought a Nintendo Wii was not because of its exclusive retail game catalog, but because it offered me access to the Wii Virtual Console, a downloadable service where I could buy a ton of Nintendo’s back catalog across a wide spectrum of the platforms they had released over the years. Never having owned a SNES or N64, and having given away my original NES under duress years prior, this was a great opportunity for players like me to replay all of the classic games of my childhood, and gave me a whole new chance to play the games I had missed out on so many years prior.

However, the Wii Shop Channel only carries games that were released to consoles. They don’t offer games that were originally intended for handheld devices like the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance or even *gasp* the Virtual Boy. However, Nintendo’s strong sense of legacy was evident, as if you had these original Game Boy cartridges, you could still play them as newer handhelds were released, as the Game Boy Advance slot was backwards compatible with original Game Boy or Game Boy Color games, and the original model Nintendo DS even carried a legacy slot for these old games, as well as its own slot for games that were exclusive to the handheld.

The Nintendo 3DS and 3DS XL lacks the legacy cartridge slot many of the early model DS handhelds had. Without the legacy slot, if you own these classic games, you’ll have to play them on their original devices, or an older device with a compatible legacy slot.

Nintendo makes up for this by offering 3DS owners access to the Nintendo eShop, similar to the Wii’s Wii Shop Channel. It allows users to purchase and download classic and new games to their 3DS and 3DS XL’s memory. There are some great games that are offered through the service that are not on the Wii Shop Channel including Super Mario Land, Metroid 2, and Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX. The service, unfortunately, does not offer a lot of content right now, but it looks like Nintendo is planning to grow it. In fact, Nintendo is now offering their first retail game for purchase and download, New Super Mario Bros 2 and has mentioned they intend to continue to support that game with their first ever downloadable content.

So I got to thinking that they couldn’t just stop where they were at. There were still tons of games that they have released over the past twenty years over all the different handhelds that should be released to this service which aren’t out at the time of writing. I understand that the service is still in its infancy and it takes Nintendo some time for them to go through their back catalog and re-release games for the new handheld, so I decided to come up with some of the games from their wide back catalog which should come to the Nintendo eShop.

Without further ado, lets get started. These are in no particular order.

Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow: This should be a complete no-brainer. These were the games that started the Pokemon fever across the world and encouraged all of us to be the very best like no one ever was. The game was really charming in its simplicity and is a great launching point for new players who may want to get into Pokemon but don’t know where to start. If there must be a priority, I recommend putting it on Yellow, as it was released some time after Red and Blue, and features scenes and options that aren’t in the Red and Blue games like Pikachu being your starting Pokemon and special appearances by Team Rocket. Some special tweaks may have to be done to port the Game Boy’s Link Cable features to be compatible with something like a Nintendo 3DS WiFi connection, but if worse came to worse, Nintendo could always choose to cut out the two-player feature, or bring it in later on.

Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures Anniversary: This was actually already released to the Nintendo eShop for free, but it was taken off the store several months ago, as it was a limited-time free game offer. I say it should come back. The Four Swords series is part of the classic Legend of Zelda property, and brought cooperative multiplayer to the franchise.  I know the game has already been out for the 3DS and was since delisted because it was a limited time free release, but Nintendo doesn’t have to make it free if they bring it back.  New 3DS owners should be offered the chance to play it.

Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: This is the game that explained just how Link got his hat, and before Skyward Sword (and the official timeline release) was considered to be the first game in the Legend of Zelda series, or at least the start of the Four Sword Saga.

Okay, at this point I’m going to just stop before I list every single Legend of Zelda handheld exclusive game, but really every single one of them should be released to the service.

Mother 3 (Earthbound 3): This one is really a no brainer. This was probably the most requested game that Nintendo has never released in North America. The heavily anticipated sequel to Earthbound (Mother 2) on the Super Nintendo, Mother 3 was originally designed for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive. The game project was killed and then later revised for the Game Boy Advance years later. It only saw a release in Japan and was never released in North America, despite the massive campaign by Earthbound fans to bring it here. Nintendo never saw an opportunity to bring it here because it would have required a full translation just around the time Nintendo planned to release the DS in North America. Well, fans have already done a full Japanese to English translation of the game, and I’m sure they would be happy to send Nintendo their code if they asked for it free of charge, so the game text could be understood by English speakers.

So there’s just a few games that I can think of which should come to the Nintendo eShop but I’m sure there are plenty more that you would want as well. What games would you like to see? Post a comment and tell us about it!