29 June, 2017
In a year all about Nintendo, the company rocked fans today by confirming rumors of a Super Nintendo Classic Edition being released later this year, and now they've followed the announcement with some good, and bad news.
That said, it's nice to know that Nintendo has been listening to gamers about the controller cord length, and will be making the needed adjustments for the SNES Classic, which is set to release in September of this year. The buzz is that there will be pre-orders available at the Nintendo website just as they did with the Nintendo Switch.
The new console's announcement comes nearly exactly a year after the mini NES system was announced.
Most people will tell you that the original Nintendo Entertainment System revitalized the video game industry after it fell apart in 1983.
Originally launched in Australia and New Zealand in 1992, the Super Nintendo is believed by many to be the best games console of its era.
Once upon a time in Singapore, I held the Nintendo Entertainment System in my hands as a young boy. Here are the details. Look forward to the Nintendo 64 Classic in 2018. With that said, the quality of games is significantly higher. The SNES Classic Edition does feature fewer games than the NES Classic Edition, but that seems to be offset by the fact that some of the games included as part of the console's lineup are 30+ hour JRPG epics. Apart from the games already mentioned, the console will include "Contra III: "The Alien Wars", "Donkey Kong Country", "EarthBound", "Final Fantasy III", "F-ZERO", Kirby Super Star", and "Kirby's Dream Course". Originally meant to be released in 1995, the game was unceremoniously cancelled and so never saw the light of day.
While it remains to be seen if Nintendo underestimated demand once again, it does seem that the company has paid attention to the most frequent criticism levelled at the NES Classic hardware itself: the cables on the SNES Classic controllers will be 1.5 metres long, 60 centimetres longer than the tiny cords from past year. This time, the controller cables are a generous 1.5 metres long, so you don't have to sit right next to your TV like with the NES Classic. Some of its ideas wound up in later Star Fox games but this is the first chance for anyone to play the original sequel. Or Nintendo can solve all of our problems and just put all these games on a Virtual Console for Nintendo Switch, a device they plan to keep selling for years. However, the SNES console is much smaller than the original one. While the NES Classic had more games, SNES games are much larger and more complex. Demand massively outstripped supply leading to farcical online sales that sold out in seconds.
This time round though, there will be several cosmetic differences to the console, depending on where you buy it from. There is some bad news, however.
Sadly, all signs point to yes.
