8BitKid: Living Bit by Bit

I am a fairly substantial Nintendo fanboy. I may have strayed from the SNES and N64, but the NES was my formative console, and I’ve had every portable they have produced (unless you count the Virtual Boy). When the Wii came out, one of my major reasons for purchasing it was the potential to play all of those back-catalogue games near and dear to my heart through the Virtual Console. It has been a joy rediscovering old favorites, and being able to play through “Super Mario Brothers 3″ again takes me back to my brother and I sitting in our family room negotiating with our mom over how many levels we could complete before we absolutely had to come in for dinner.

So, as a man who spends his life on the road, I want to be able to take this nostalgia with me. Considering the available horsepower of the DS combined with its WiFi capabilities, I am dismayed to not be able to have my Virtual Console locker be portable. My dream setup would be that I could transfer my VC titles from my Wii to my DS via wireless connectivity or have access to a DS store via WiFi for purchasing on the go. Nintendo already has licensing deals in place to provide catalogue access to systems like the Genesis, TurboGrafx 16, Neo Geo, etc., and could offer handheld consoles from the portable timeline like Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket, Game Gear, and all the rest. Additionally, Nintendo could leverage their kiosks and WiFi download locations as distribution points for VC. They have great infrastructure already in place that they could leverage to help roll out DS Virtual Console access to the masses. Nintendo could offer a unified mobile platform for all classic gaming.

Nintendo complains about the financial damages it suffers due to piracy, specifically from flash cards. For the uninitiated, a flash card is a rewritable memory card for the DS that allows gamers to run downloaded software on the DS. While these products can be used for law-abiding, non-copyright-infringing purposes liking running homebrew, I am sure that a majority of purchasers of these flash cards are using them to pirate games. However, there are people who see these cards as a way to run emulators to achieve the goal of classic gaming on the go. A DS VC would at least provide a solution for this flavor of gamers who want nothing more than to play “Megaman 4″ while stuck in line at the airport (I fall into that camp)

So, Nintendo, I implore you: please let me go retro with my DS. Let me enjoy a round of “Bomberman ‘93″ while stuck on the subway. Save me from wasting nights scouring the depths of the internet to learn about obscure emulator ports to debate whether I want to go through the effort just to play “Ice Hockey” in bed. My DS rarely leaves my side, and I would love it if Nintendo would create a portable Virtual Console so the classics can travel with me as well.

- images courtesy of nintendo.com

Wow. I mean, wow. This is the union of two of the most important things in my life: Nerf Guns and video games. *Sniffle* (of joy). May heaven help those I work with…

- image courtesy of Shacknews