Nintendo has revealed details for the SNES Classic. The standalone mini console will feature 21 games, including Super Mario World, Earthbound, Super Mario Kart, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. But the most surprising inclusion is Star Fox 2, the unreleased sequel to the original Star Fox for SNES.
No Chrono Trigger.
Why would I buy a SNES if I can’t play the best game ever made on it? This is a baffling, dealbreaking omission.
I believe Chrono is a Square Enix title. All the titles are Nintendo owned.
Edit: I’m wrong cause Secret of Mana is also a Square Enix title. Mega Man X and Street Fighter are Capcom. I wonder if there’s a shared ownership between those companies for those titles.
Edited 2017-06-26 18:49 UTC
It is especially weird not to include Chrono Trigger and do include Secret of Mana. Maybe they think it would cannibalize iOS or Android sales? That would seem unlikely.
I doubt concern over mobile sales has anything to do with it. Mobile gaming and novelty products like this aren’t direct competition. It probably came down to money. More specifically, Square Enix probably wanted too much money for the licensing, and Nintendo understandably said no.
Also Final Fantasy III is on that list. I second your bafflement as one of the most interesting features of Secret of Mana was the ability to use a multi-tap and have 3 friends play together. I don’t think you’ll be able to do that on this mini one? Chrono Trigger would have been a better choice in that sense (although Secret of Mana is great).
At least Final Fantasy III is there. If they had released this without a FF title, it’d be downright stupid. But yeah, the omission of Chrono Trigger is baffling.
Yeah, FF III (or VI depending on your location) is a pretty big deal. I have fond memories of that game.
Why not include the damn cartridge slot? Don’t give me “manufacturing cost” as a reason, either. It’s quite nominal (having fab’d a few boards myself) to include that hardware.
It’s a lot like a “greatest hits” collection. I mean it’s cool in some ways because it just generates motion around the retro scene (motion != action, but isn’t bad). For someone like me, it’s just rehashing old stuff without anything new to offer (other than HDMI which isn’t nothing).
I’d much rather them have released a premium SNES with HDMI, better sound (HDMI, built in RCA on the head unit, or PCM over optical), better connectors such as built-in composite RGB, and a network interface to do remote-internet-based-coop-gaming. Plus, if they were smart, they’d put in firmware to allow for a “game store” ala the WII, 3DS, or Switch. Now THAT would have been worth waiting and paying for.
Taking away my cartridge slot made the whole thing like some kind of rinky-dink drugstore ripoff console from retron or someone even lower rent (at least the Retron has a cartridge slot!).
Keep in mind I still have a real SNES hooked up to a Sony 20″ Trinitron PVM monitor. So, this is absolutely worthless to me. One can have all the SNES games on a single SD card via a Super EverDrive. Granted it’s $200 but if you really wanted a big game endownment… that’s far superior to 30 pre-picked games.
100% agree.
To me, the biggest NES/SNESmini sin is the lack of an ANALOG video output… playing low resolution games created for CRT displays in a modern LCD TV is an atrocious experience and It’s not representative of how these games looked back in the day at all.
The so called “pixel art” look is a fucking lie, back in the day you didn’t see blocky graphics in a SNES game!! SNES games looked (and look) AMAZING in a CRT TV even by today standards. The blocky mess people usually see in modern LCD TVs when they play retro games is not the real deal because those graphics were not designed for digital discrete displays like LCD.
Classic games must be played on CRT TV/monitors to be representative of what they ware. Modern generations don’t get real deal with these HDMI emulator boxes like the NES or the SNES mini, they are misleading representations of what We enjoyed.
I think what we enjoyed was well beyond the graphics.. there were so many other things that made it “great”.
You are 100% right, but graphics are an important part of these games too. If you’ve never experienced them in their original form you are missing a lot.
Bear in mind people born in early 2000s never seen a real SNES nor a CRT, if they only use SNES Mini (or another HDMI emulator) they will get a wrong idea about the 16 bit era.
To me that’s a shame… because 16 bits games (console and arcades) were not a pixel mess like today kids tend to imagine… they looked amazing and very cartoon like on CRT displays.
High res digital displays DESTROYED those artistic creations because they were not designed with discrete digital displays in mind, they were designed for analogue cathodic rays… and that’s something only “old school” people like us know and that’s really sad.
You can always apply a CRT-looking shader, that works pretty well : http://leonard.oxg.free.fr/SC1425/SC1425.html
Looks pretty good! It’s based on the SC1425 cool
BTW I don’t think SNES Mini will have a hq filter like this one… in fact, filters present in NES Mini suck and they don’t look like the real thing at all.
I think, some years from now, people will be craving for CRT displays again… analogue displays are so nice for (retro) gaming… last year I bought a Sony PVM just for playing NeoGeo and SNES and man it’s impossible to go back to crappy LCD monitors after trying a PVM. Best monitor ever created, I highly recommend it to every retro gamer, it’s a must.
Do you know if the source code of this wonderful shader is available?
Edited 2017-06-28 09:21 UTC
Ask Leonard, see root of site, CV
If you’re going to add cost you have to justify it with demand. Maybe there’s a handful of people who still own old CRT tvs/monitors but that obviously doesn’t describe the majority of consumers today. Why would you add cost just to satisfy a tiny sliver of your customers? The lack of analog output is not a deal breaker for people interested in this type of product.
Oddly, the ATGames Atari / Sega flashback things do it a bit more right. 1) they include cartridge ports on their non-mobile systems. And their mobile systems have SD card slots.
Downside is they don’t provide a save feature for anything you put on the SD card…
With the @Games Flashback consoles, only the Genesis has a cartridge slot. Ataris, ColecoVisions and Intellivisions lack the feature. But one of the older Ataris could have a cartridge slot soldered in.
I’ve got one each of all four.
It looks like it has a cartridge slot to me. It’s just behind the logo on the top. I’ve seen a picture of the UK version which definitely has a slot. They both have “Eject” buttons; what is there to eject except a cartridge?
https://store.nintendo.co.uk/nintendo-classic-mini-hardware/nintendo…
Fake slot, like on the NES mini ?
This is the exact article I would have written. So either you can read my mind… or my Twitter feed, where I said about the same.
Reading that headline was really eerie, because it really was reading my own inner dialog.
I hope they actually make enough of them this time. I was unable to find a NES classic locally and the few auctions online were going for insane amounts.
They made enough of the NES. It’s not intended to be a stockable/core item with continued production. It’s meant to generate fast revenue. If you create too much supply, you damage your ability to charge a premium price.
Fingers crossed we work out how to add more of the catalogue to the device, though with custom chips on the carts this would probably have some limitations I presume.
No Mario All Stars?!
Its a shame when companies *nearly* get it but just don’t quite, if only they’d fed the output through a shader, if only they had allowed a “cartridge” – if you really must only allow DRM encrypted images on your SD card “cartridge” – although again this might be missing the point, allowing homebrew images might kickstart a little niche market…
But heck to half do the job, is just a little bit frustrating…
I can’t understand all this excitement, really.
It is indeed a nice gadget, and maybe we want to relive that excitement of youth, but for $80 you can buy a used Nintendo DS which runs all the SNES games that were ever ported to the DS or the Advance (which I would say is essentially all, or all that are worth and many more).
And second hand DS games must be two-a-penny, even before you consider using a flash cartridge where you can stuff your 100 favorite bootlegged games.
Edited 2017-06-27 08:37 UTC
I guess being able to play SNES games on an HDTV is the selling point?
It’s a novelty product targeting those who have a sense of nostalgia for the SNES. Like the NES Classic, it’s a limited production premium-priced item intended to generate quick revenue for the company. Companies do this when they either need cash fast or need funding for bigger efforts.
Chrono Trigger was released for the DS not too long ago and might be still actively being developed for the Switch or 3DS, so I can see how they don’t want to include it, considering that it’s still recent in people’s memory. I think that they are first releasing games that hit certain nostalgia points without cannibalizing sales of other games.