Play 20 classic Super NES games plus *gasp* the never-before-released Star Fox 2 game! The '90s called; they want their controllers back Two wired Super NES Classic Controllers are included for instant multiplayer action. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System™: Super NES Classic Edition has the original look and feel, only smaller, and pre-loaded with 21 games—including the never-before-released Star Fox 2 game!
It’s Super Nintendo Classic day, which means it is time for us to crack open the console, take a long hard look at the list of games that comes with it, and RANK THEM ALL.
Here, separated by tiers, are the 21 SNES Classic games, ranked from worst to best.
The Super Nintendo Classic is a miniature blast of nostalgia, a sleekly packaged piece of hardware…
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These are the games you don’t really need to play in 2017.
21. Super Ghouls’n Ghosts
Best known as one of the more difficult games in the Super Nintendo’s lineup, Super Ghouls’n Ghosts wasn’t even fun when it launched. Now it’s just awful. Combine an unforgiving damage system with clunky controls (that double jump—uch) and you’ve got the worst video game on the SNES Classic.
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20. Star Fox
What was once a revolutionary space shooter is today a mess of polygons, with a brutally choppy framerate making Star Fox damn near unplayable.
19. Star Fox 2
As incredible as it is to play a brand new, unreleased Super Nintendo game in 2017, Star Fox 2 suffers from many of the same problems as its predecessor. I found it tough to play, unfortunately. At least the music is really good.
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18. Contra III: The Alien Wars
While it still feels good to jump and roll around as a super-soldier in Contra III, this is a very short, insubstantial game that makes up for its length by being completely unforgiving. If you’re willing to stick with it and use the SNES Classic’s rewind feature, though, you’ll be rewarded with some spectacles (and wild perspective shifts) that still look pretty cool.
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These games are worth a few minutes of poking, especially if you’ve never played them before, but you don’t need to spend much time with them.
17. Super Punch-Out
Like Punch-Out before it, Super Punch-Out puts you in a boxing ring and asks you to read your opponent’s moves, dodging and punching and countering along the way. It’s fine.
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16. Kirby’s Dream Course
This is a Kirby golf game. I guess it’s also fine.
15. F-Zero
Worth looking into for historical purposes, but if you want to play a racing game on your shiny new SNES Classic, you’ll want to go with F-Zero’s spiritual successor, Super Mario Kart.
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Here is where we start to enter “you should actually play these!” territory. This tier includes games that are good but not great.
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14. Kirby Super Star
This collection of platformers and minigames never quite reaches the heights of Kirby’s Adventure, but it remains fun(ish) today.
13. Super Castlevania IV
The platforming in the fourth Castlevania feels clunky today, but dangling your whip like a dead fish never gets old.
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12. Street Fighter II
In the 1990s this game was phenomenal, and today it still feels really neat, if a bit rusty. Dhalsim is OP.
11. Super Mario Kart
Doesn’t hold a candle to Mario Kart 8, but if you’re in the mood for some old-school racing, Super Mario Kart is significantly better than F-Zero. And there’s something really fun and authentic about driving around 16-bit versions of the Ghost House, Bowser’s Castle, and of course, Rainbow Road.
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These games are excellent, full stop. They’re not in the upper-upper echelon, perhaps because they’ve got a few niggling flaws or they’ve grown a bit wrinkly over the past two decades, but they’re still worth your time.
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10. Yoshi’s Island
Although it never got as much attention as its perfect predecessor (coming up later), Yoshi’s Island is still a very good—if slightly too easy—platformer.
9. Donkey Kong Country
There are a few technical problems preventing Donkey Kong Country from feeling as perfect today as it did back then. For starters, something’s wonky about the way the screen scrolls when you run through levels. This is still an excellent (and tough!) platformer, but it hasn’t aged quite as well as, say, #4 on this list.
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8. Mega Man X
Why has Capcom given up on such a great action-platforming series? I don’t know. But Mega Man X is the best of them all, and you should definitely play it. It’s challenging but not as infuriating as the NES Mega Mans, and the bosses are pretty damn cool. (Storm Eagle is a highlight.)
7. Secret of Mana
Weird bugs and hit detection errors prevent Secret of Mana from being the PERFECT action-RPG, but between the music, the vibe, and the awesome variety of characters and settings, this game is definitely worth your time. You get to fight Santa Claus! You might want to wait for the remake, though.
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6. Super Mario RPG
None of Nintendo’s very good Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi role-playing games have lived up to the original. Super Mario RPG is hilarious, charming, clever, and full of smart ideas that still hold up today. The only reason this game isn’t in the top 5 is that in 2017, its age has really started to show. Combat can be sluggish, and the lack of proper feedback on some of the timed moves can be frustrating for new players. Still, you should play this game.
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These five games could basically go in any order. They’re all masterpieces.
5. Earthbound
Even today, it’s hard to find an RPG that can hit your emotions as hard as Earthbound. Telling the story of a psychic kid named Ness and his three buds who must save the world from a nasty alien named Giygas, Earthbound is weird, quirky, sad, hilarious, and beautiful. You probably have heard this before.
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4. Super Mario World
Perhaps the perfect 2D platformer, Super Mario World is the game that introduced us to Yoshi, the best dinosaur in video game history. It’s also a marvelous puzzle box full of hidden secrets, grueling platforming challenges, and infectious music. It has not only held up well—it’s better than just about any other sidescrolling platformer you can get today. (Read more here.)
3. Super Metroid
Super Metroid is a game about secrets, about paying attention to the world around you and remembering where to return once you’ve gotten new abilities. It remains as mysterious and fascinating as it was when we first played it. And rolling up into a Morph Ball just never gets old.
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2. The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past
Link to the Past would be the best Zelda game of all time if Breath of the Wild hadn’t come around. But with ten dungeons, two big world maps full of secrets to find and items to collect, and combat that still feels smooth, this game is a gem. Must-play.
1. Final Fantasy VI
Still the perfect role-playing game. (Read more here.)
| Also known as | Nintendo Classic Mini: Nintendo Entertainment System (Europe and Australia) Nintendo Classic Mini: Family Computer (Japan) |
|---|---|
| Developer | Nintendo |
| Manufacturer | Nintendo |
| Type | Dedicated console |
| Release date |
|
| Lifespan | 2016 – present |
| Introductory price | US$59.99 C$79.99 €59.95 ¥5,980 £49.99 A$99 |
| Discontinued | (Original 2016 launch) |
| Units sold | 3.6 million (as of June 30, 2018) |
| Media | Internal flash memory |
| System-on-chip used | Allwinner R16, Quad-Core ARM Cortex-A7 |
| Memory | 256 MB of DDR3 RAM |
| Storage | 512 MBNAND Flash TSOP48 |
| Graphics | Mali-400 MP |
| Controller input | 2 controller ports |
| Successor | Super NES Classic Edition |
Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition, known as Nintendo Classic Mini: Nintendo Entertainment System in Europe and Australia and Nintendo Classic Mini: Family Computer (Japanese: ニンテンドークラシックミニ ファミリーコンピュータ) in Japan, is a dedicated video game console by Nintendo, which emulates the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It launched on November 10, 2016 in Australia and Japan, and November 11, 2016 in North America and Europe. Aesthetically, the console is a miniature replica of the NES, and it includes a static library of 30 built-in games from the licensed NES library, supporting save states for all of them.
Nintendo produced and sold about 2.3 million NES Classic Editions from November 2016 through April 2017, with shipments selling out nearly immediately. In April 2017, Nintendo announced they were discontinuing the product, leading to consumer confusion, and incidents of greatly increased pricing among private sellers. Due to the demand of the NES Classic, and the success of the Super NES Classic Edition console, Nintendo re-introduced the NES Classic on June 29, 2018. Production was discontinued again in December 2018.
The NES Classic Edition is a dedicated console for emulating 30 Nintendo Entertainment System games.[1][2] The console is distributed in two variations; one for Japan, featuring the likeness of the original Famicom,[3] and one for the rest of the world, which looks like the original NES. For the non-Japanese variation, all of the games are based on their US release, running at 60 Hz and using the names by which they were released in the United States. The console's user interface supports up to eight languages, but this does not affect the language for the games themselves.
Internally, the console uses an Allwinner R16 system on a chip with four ARM Cortex-A7 central processing cores and an ARM Mali 400 MP2 graphics processing unit. It includes 512 MB of flash storage and 256 MB of DDR3 memory.[4][5]
For video output, the system features an HDMI connection, which puts out 60 Hz video for all games.
The controllers in the international version of the console feature the Wii Nunchuk's connector, which allows the controller to be connected to the Wii Remote for use with Virtual Console games on the Wii and Wii U. Accessories for the Wii such as the Classic Controller may be used with the NES Classic.[6][7][8] The controllers for the Japanese version are hardwired into the console just like in the original Famicom, so they cannot be used in conjunction with the Wii. The Famicom Mini controllers are also proportioned to the size of the console, resulting in them being smaller than their North American or European counterpart. They fit into small holding slots on the side of the console. The Famicom Mini comes with two controllers. The microphone on the Player 2 controller is superficial only and does not work.[9]
The console uses the Linux operating system, running a new Nintendo Entertainment System emulation engine developed by Nintendo European Research & Development (NERD).[10][4] The emulation included limited support for some of the memory management controllers, aka mappers, used in NES cartridges to extend the ability of the console, such as for Super Mario Bros. 3, though not all known mappers were included with the emulation engine.[4] The emulation engine was well-received by critics and was regarded as superior in both visual and audio support when compared to the NES Virtual Console emulation on the Wii U.
A 320-page book called Playing with Power: Nintendo NES Classics, published by Prima Games, was released the same day as the console;[11] the book is a guide to some of the games included on the system. Nintendo of America brought back the Nintendo Power Line as an automated phone hotline from November 11 to 13 as a celebration of the launch of the system.[12]
Regardless of the model or region, the microconsole included 30 built-in games in all regions. Games that originally had different titles in the PAL regions use their respective American monikers, such as Ninja Gaiden (originally Shadow Warriors) and Super C (originally Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces). From the 30 included titles, 22 are common between all regions, while the eight remaining ones are exclusive to either Japan or North America/PAL region respectively.[13][9]
| Common to all regions | NA/PAL NES Exclusive | JP Famicom Exclusive |
|---|---|---|
|
The NES Classic Edition was first released on November 10, 2016 in Japan and Australia,[15] and November 11 in North America and Europe.[16] With the limited supply, these initial shipments sold out almost immediately.[17]
Nintendo produced about 2.3 million NES Classic Editions over the next five months.[18] By April 13, 2017, Nintendo announced it was ceasing production of the unit, with final shipments sent out within the next few days.[19]
Nintendo's decision to stop production of the console was met with criticism due to consumer's lack of awareness of the limited availability of the console, as described below. Following the announcement of the Super NES Classic Edition, which served as a counterpart to the NES Classic Edition but for Super Nintendo Entertainment System titles,[20] Nintendo announced that it would also resume production of the NES Classic Edition in 2018.[21] Nintendo brought renewed shipments of the system on June 29, 2018, with production of the system expected to continue throughout the year.[22][23][24]
Upon its re-release in June 2018, the NES Classic Mini sold more units than the PS4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch.[25]
Combined sales of the NES and SNES Classic editions by September 30, 2018 exceeded 10 million units.[26]
On December 13, 2018, Reggie Fils-Aimé affirmed that both the NES and SNES Classic Editions will not be restocked after the 2018 holiday season, nor does Nintendo anticipate producing any similar mini-console version of its other home consoles in the future.[27]
Aside from criticism regarding the controller cord being too short as well as minor emulation glitches, especially with sound, the NES Classic Edition has been well received.[28][29]
One of many 'plug-n-play' consoles on the market, the demand for NES Classic Edition was notably large, with various retailers collectively selling approximately 196,000 units in its first month,[30] remarkably selling out within hours of availability.[31] Nintendo reported 1.5 million units had been sold by the end of 2016.[32] On April 28, 2017, Nintendo revealed that 2.3 million consoles were sold in total.[18] Following the rerelease of the console, Nintendo had sold about 1.3 million additional units through June 30, 2018.[33]
Despite the positive reception, journalists were confused about Nintendo's decision to discontinue the unit as announced in April 2017. Nintendo did not say at launch that the system was meant to be only a limited run, and its messaging for it seemed to suggest it would be a product with a longer production life. The company clarified, when announcing the discontinuation, that 'NES Classic Edition wasn’t intended to be an ongoing, long-term product. However, due to high demand, we did add extra shipments to our original plans.'[34] The lack of availability of the unit since launch, with shipments immediately selling out when they reach stores, also suggested Nintendo was not prepared for the demand for the product.[35]Nintendo of America's CEO Reggie Fils-Aimé later stated that 'We just didn't anticipate how incredible the response would be', having considered the sales of other similar retro-consoles, but they had to discontinue the unit as 'we've got a lot going on right now and we don’t have unlimited resources.'[36][37]
According to an April 2017 report by Eurogamer, the discontinuation of the NES Classic was in part to transition the production line to a Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) Classic system designed similarly to the NES Classic but featuring games from the SNES, to be launched in late 2017, though Nintendo did not confirm this information.[38] While journalists agreed an SNES Classic would be a more enticing product and Nintendo would likely be more prepared to produce a larger number of systems, Nintendo's decision with the NES Classic may have influenced consumers to be wary of trying to buy a system produced in low volumes, or give the impression of artificial scarcity with the product as part of a longer-term strategy to keep consumers demanding Nintendo products.[35][39][40] When the Super NES Classic Edition was officially announced in June 2017, Nintendo said it 'will produce significantly more units of Super NES Classic Edition than we did of NES Classic Edition' to avoid a similar shortage issue, but reaffirmed that it was not anticipated to be an ongoing product.[20] In December 2018, Fils-Aimé affirmed that both the NES and SNES Classic Editions will not be restocked after the holiday season, nor does Nintendo anticipate producing any similar mini-console version of its other home consoles in the future.[27]
Shortly after the NES Classic Edition's release, hackers discovered ways to unofficially add up to 700 titles to the system's library,[41] as well as enable emulation support for other consoles. Games from various consoles, such as the Nintendo 64 and 32X, have been successfully made to run on the NES Classic Edition.[42][4]
The NES Classic Edition's very limited stock during its original release in 2016 was one of its main criticisms,[43] with some stores receiving fewer than 10 units at a time. This, coupled with the extremely high demand, prompted internet scalpers to buy as many as they could, so they could resell them with extreme price markups. In the US, prices were commonly set between $200 and $500, compared to its launch price of $59.99. The separate controller that could be bought without the console suffered the same fate, often being included with the main unit.[44] The limited supply of NES Classic was compared to the situation around Amiibo shortages, which similarly were offered by Nintendo in limited quantity and led to scalping and high resale prices, frustrating fans.[45][46]
When Nintendo announced it was discontinuing the NES Classic Edition in April 2017, Nintendo enthusiasts and some outlets such as Polygon and The Verge believed that Nintendo planned on a limited release of the NES classic to drive artificial scarcity and increase sales, but which got out of hand with scalpers and secondary sales which have backfired on them.[47][48][49] Nintendo denied these claims, stating that it was limited by its own rate of production with other hardware products, and that 'It's definitely not intentional in terms of shorting the market'.[50]
Following the April 2017 discontinuation, consumers found that several bootleg versions of the NES Classic Edition appeared on third party auction sites, typically produced by Chinese companies. These bootlegs have been found to be near-identical in hardware and software, which could confuse consumers who were looking to purchase a Classic Edition.[51]
A limited Shōnen Jump Edition of the Famicom Mini was released only in Japan on July 7, 2018. Colored gold to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Shueisha's Weekly Shōnen Jumpmanga magazine, the special edition features 20 Famicom games largely based on Shōnen Jump manga properties, including Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Kinnikuman.[52][53]
This edition of the console includes the following games:
|
|
|
Within two days, over 110,000 units of the Shōnen Jump unit had been sold.[54]
The new version has been out of stock since Nov. 11, when it sold out in a single day.
Nintendo answered the call of nostalgia in 2016 with the highly limited NES Classic Edition. It's a palm-sized version of the original console that doesn't have an actual cartridge slot, and instead came pre-loaded with 30 classic NES games including Donkey Kong and Balloon Fight. Demand was gigantic: So much so, the console was re-released in June of 2018 and beat out the PS4, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch for units sold.
Most of the games sound nearly the same as their NES versions, but devoted fans will notice a few deviations, whether it's the oddly muffled beat of the first-level music in Kid Icarus or the slightly tinnier clangs of a heart counter winding back after a Castlevania level. The games are also based on their Virtual Console versions, so StarTropics renames its yoyo weapon a “star.”
Nintendo look as though they may have something of a hit on their hands with their latest console offering.
The NES Classic sells an impressive 196,000 units in the US in the month of November, significantly outpacing the sales of Nintendo’s eighth generation Wii U console.
Nintendo’s NES Classic Edition is out today, as in sold out today, as in chances are if you’re just stepping out the door to pick one up, it’s probably too late.
| Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nintendo Classic Mini. |
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