Nintendo recently announced that they will be re-releasing Gamecube games on the Wii, I guess these are being termed “GameCube Masterpieces.” In a lot of ways this idea seems rather redundant more than anything else. After all, you can already play GameCube games on the Wii, just go to Gamestop or something and buy them used for cheap. However, I don’t think this is altogether a bad idea. After all, many people didn’t have a Gamecube, and many people DO have a Wii.
By re-releasing GameCube games, Nintendo actually is doing a couple of really intelligent things. First, they are giving exposure to games that may not have received as fair a shot as they should have gotten largely because of the smaller marketshare they had. You can actually see this reflected in their first choices of games. The first two games appear to be Pikmin and Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat. I don’t think either one of these games really did as well as Nintendo had hoped, and so bringing them back in a new form will give them another time to shine, which in turn may allow Nintendo to invest further in these newer franchises.
The second thing this does is that it allows NIntendo to put out triple-A quality games inbetween their normal titles, and therefor diminishing some of the complaints about all the shovelware being put out. After all, it is true that while there is a ton of really bad titles, there are times that you can go months without any decent NEW title on the WII. Well ok so you aren’t exactly getting a new title here, but you are getting something decent to fill in.
I do think a major worry for Nintendo really is that you can just buy used versions of these games anyway. However, if NIntendo does this thing right, this won’t be an issue as much. First of all, they need to lower the pricepoing, I expect these games to be around $19.99 – 29.99 (think the new age of Player’s Choice titles). The other nice thing about these titles is that they will likely work with the Wiimote, and while I realize a lot of people prefer the GameCube controller, I don’t like the wires and don’t want to invest in wireless GameCube controllers after the GameCube is dead. Another thing they could do is add features, say an extra Pikmin level or something. I also would like to see them put Pikmin 1 & 2 on the same disc as I think a lot more people missed 2 than missed 1 and I think this would give much greater value to the re-release as a whole. Plus, the Wii should be able to handle two GameCube games on a single disc if done right.
I think that this GameCube masterpieces re-release on the Wii could really work. I’m interested and somewhat excited to see how Nintendo pulls it off. Hopefully, they don’t completely screw it up because it could work really nicely to do exactly what Nintendo hopes to do. And then we might actually see a Pikmin 3 which really should happen on the Wii anyway.