SAG Episode 146: The Return Of The Vest
Dan took the week off to celebrate being Dan, so Dean subbed in for him. He donned his vest and spent some time discussing the excellent Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s rap remake, the NES Classic Edition, Zelda, and more.
Note on the NES Classic – it does not use Wii parts, so they weren’t just burning through leftover product. It uses a very cheap, very basic single board computer based on an Allwinner ARM chip, which is similar to what people do with Raspberry Pi devices running emulation and other single board computers doing the same. In fact, the similarity is what allowed people to figure out how to hack in more games and other entire systems and software packages onto the NES Classic. The bad news is that this makes the NES Classic much closer to the Switch’s hardware (both using ARM based chips, although obviously the Switch’s is a much more advanced beast than the NES Classic’s) than to the Wii or Wii U, both of which shared PowerPC architecture and AMD based graphics. This is bad news because it could potentially be indicative of the emulation we’re to expect if the NES Classic was some kind of misguided test case for Switch Virtual Console. It’s only bad news if Nintendo is lazy and just ports the emulator used on the NES Classic to the Switch’s Tegra with no refinement, which would most likely carry over things like sound issues. And we’ve seen them do lazy things like port that PAL version of that game you mentioned not only to the Wii but then onto the Wii U. However, the Wii U’s Virtual Console being inferior to the Wii’s is still baffling.
Have you ever heard of Mega Man 2.5D? It’s an unlicensed fan game, made by a single programmer acting alone, and it’s worth looking up on Youtube. Maybe it resembles what you were talking about with a possible Mega Man re-release.
I have heard of Mega Man 2.5D. It’s not quite what I had in mind, but it’s pretty rad in its own right.