One of Nintendo,s selling points for the Wii is its ability to act as a “virtual game console.” In layman’s terms, this means the Wii will be able to play games in the Nintendo pantheon, including NES, SNES and N64 games. But many have wondered just how accurate these games will be in their recreation of the original titles. According to Nintendo, they will be very true renditions.
Nintendo Europe said, "All games will be faithful recreations of the original versions so they will not feature new functions like multiplayer or internet play if the original title did not. The Virtual Console games faithfully reproduce the original game in all areas, including content, movement and expressions. Principle programming, characters, sound etc. have not been changed."
In as far as mapping these games to the game controller, Nintendo stated, "Controller layouts will be determined on a game-by-game basis and detailed in the electronic manual."
The games will be downloadable through Nintendo,s online download service and onto the flash memory of the Wii, which is 512MB in size. Estimates for game sizes break down to about 1MB for NES titles, 5MB for SNES and 32MB for N64 games. The 512MB size limit will no doubt, be filled to maximum capacity in no time, and because of this, speculation about a hard drive accessory persists. To date, Nintendo has not offered any hint of such a device, although the onboard USB ports could be used to attach stand alone HDDs sometime in the future.
