Anyone manage to snag one of these little guys from Amazon? My boss decided she had to tell me three things she told me days ago and I couldn’t hop on until 5:05EST and after bugging out for three minutea(in stock-click to add-shopping cart empty) it went unavailable and has been bugging every 5 or so minutes as 3rd party vendors pop up and half the nation attempts to buy them at the same time.
Maybe Amazon should have borrowed the scale able power of Google for this one. Prime(sic) example of what @dan and all of us don’t want to have happen on Day 0.
I honestly don’t understand the appeal. How can it be enjoyable when you don’t have to blow in the cartridges just right in order to play the game?
I still have my NES from the early 90s and I tried to make my nieces and nephews play with me a couple of years ago. They were not impressed - kept tripping over the cords and asking it had super smash bros. Maybe I should find an Atari so they’ll learn to appreciate the NES…
Are there any plans to add more games in the future for this thing? We used to have a game where a happy blob hit bees and then went in reverse, but I don’t know what happened to it.
Most of it is just nostalgia. However I will say the NES had some very good and playable games. You would be surprised how many of the cartridges are still available.
In fairness, it was only the item page and anything to do with that item ID. Do search page, item listing, 3rd party vendors page, basket in association with item that were bugging. The rest of the site seemed to be just fine.
No. It’s a one shot deal. Though one of the online gaming magazines priced it to $78 to buy just the games(Wii store, ds, etc)(no console to play on)and 2 games aren’t available any other way
My 12 year old is obsessed with retro gaming…we still have our N64 and NES. He has emulators on his computer but nothing is better than playing the games on their native consoles. He is currently playing Megaman and Doom although he also is rewriting Doom by adding maps using his PC…lol
I was able to snag one at Target in downtown Seattle. I got there about 15 minutes before they opened, I was 22nd in line and they got 28 of them… but only two of the extra controllers.
It’s a lot of fun. The term NES hard is a thing for a reason… those games are difficult!
Most of the appeal is the nostalgia for me. I also like the fact that I can take this many games with me on trips and stuff. We hooked it up in the conference room at lunch on Friday! It is ridiculously tiny.
Two things I was disappointed with. 1) I was hoping for an opening front door on it, maybe for future cartridges or something, but the shell is just a visual. 2) the cord for the controller is only 2’ long. I literally have to sit the NES on an ottoman as far as I can get it from the tv, and then sit on another ottoman as far from the NES as I can to be able to play it on my big TV. All I’m saying is that more thought should have gone into the fact that most people have relatively large Tvs and can’t sit so close to them.
With emulators being a thing that exists, I don’t see the draw for the mini.
I still have my NES and cartridges. None of them particularly work. But that is why emulators exist as a legal entity. I have a raspberry Pi hooked to my TV, and a Bluetooth NES controller. And I can play to my heart’s content.
What was the cost of the setup (Raspberry Pi and controller seem like the only items that would cost).
Are emulators legal? I would think that Nintendo would have something to say about that considering they still sell these games directly via the Wii/Wii-U, and actively use the licenses… but I haven’t done any research on the subject so I wouldn’t know.
Now, the page has a lot of information, and is written by Nintendo lawyers. The heavy assumption there is that most people are downloading ROMs illegally, and so in essentially every paragraph they make sure to say that is wrong and bad.
They never explicitly say it, but the verification in their wording is that: If you own the game yourself, and you generate your own ROM, then having that ROM and a way to make use of it (an emulator) is legal.
For my emulator, it is just a controller ($35), and a Pi ($35 again). You will also need a memory card of whatever size is convenient.
Getting the ROMs the legal way is surprisingly hard. And a strong argument for why DCMA and other such anti-piracy laws serve to drive piracy up. If companies would invest the time to provide legitimate digital versions of their old software and maintain their own ROMs, people really would happily buy them (These retro consoles having such large demand alone attests to the fact)
The appeal for me is that I get several games that are nostalgic for me, all in one shot, for one relatively low price. The alternative is to spend slightly more money to get the same thing, but with more work involved, and the potential of bad ROMs - meaning more work to try again until I get a quality one. Sure it’s open-ended, but most of what I would even be interested in emulating is already on the NES Classic Mini. I fully intend to buy a cable extension which is $10… so same price as the Pi route, but again, with no extra effort.
Honestly, I just don’t put enough time into video games to make it worth any more effort just to have the open-endedness of the Pi option.
I’m a Nintendo/Sony guy, always have been. The only Sega game I recall liking is Turbo Taxi, and I have that on my PS3.
Yeah, for me I already had a Pi and memory card on hand, so the investment was just a controller. And I plan to run a lot more than just NES, so that automatically makes the retail approaches inferior.
