do it.

I never understood why Nintendo has been so hesitant to localize Earthbound. Especially when the games take place in a largely Western setting, and especially in this age where digital distribution means no risk of losing tons of money with packaging & shipping.

It sux

yo i need to get a keyboard for my wii. i remember buying earthbound for $70, when it came out. back in my day….

By this point, Nintendo really should be getting the picture. I can just see some Nintendo guy tallying up these polls and saying “That’s our Starmen.net!”

woo hoo, all according to plan, yay starmen.net

Dang Phat, I feel for you. I got mine for $5 at Best Buy though. And I bought entirely on the fact that the box was the size of my chest.

$5? wow thats crazy! You kno that reminds me, i almost sold my copy like 8 years ago but they didnt want the box or the guide, so i kept all of it. And also because thet were gonna give me like $10 for it, but sell it for $40. Wish almost reminds me how i bought some games on clearence at a local toy store, a few weeks before, and then traded them in a few weeks later for a profit.

wheres bionic commando?

those five games in a slightly different order are exactly what I listed in my survey answer

I am made of awesome

I know the point of this story was Earthbound, and that’s all well and good. But about the mention of Mother3: Honestly, I dearly hope Mother3 doesn’t come out for the Wii VC. If it does, then the fan translation project will shut down, and honestly, I really don’t want to play Mother3 tied to my screen.

If it is released on the VC, I will be stuck playing it on the VC every time I want to play. And what’s more, it’ll be tied to the system in a half-purchased format that doesn’t really feel like ownership to me.

Instead, I want to put it on my GB Micro and take it around with me for a few blissful weeks. I have bought TWO Japanese copies (one for a friend), and all I ask is to be able to play it in English as a GBA cart… I’m not eager to pay again for less of an experience being tied to the VC.

Here’s hoping Nintendo finally release it the US at least. I would love to order the GBA carts in English!

Not releasing Mother 3 in North America was a big enough screw-up but Nintendo is truly doomed if they can’t pay enough attention to their fans to at least give Earthbound a chance…

Ok. This is just me, but I found EarthBound to be boring as SHIT.

What I think should be done with Earthbound is a localized pre-buying program.

Right Stuf (An anime store and release company) has done this with several of their releases. In order to gauge on if/when they release a property.. they took pre-orders. The idea was to see if there would be enough people who preordered the release to cover the cost of the release.

Let’s put it this way. Would you buy a localization of Mother 1 & 2 on the GBA and Mother 3 on the GBA? Of course you say you would. But would you be willing to pay $4.99 to reserve it and $34.95 for it when it arrives? (Total price would be $39.95.)

That’s what Nintendo should do. Make people put their money where their mouth is. Would you fork out $39.95 for a GBA game?

I already set mine aside, would you?

Nintendo does pay attention to fans. But fans have a problem paying “attention” to Nintendo. “Attention” being actual money.

@Gogiguy

Yep, it is just you.

Earthbound is one of the few games I have ever played where it is just a joy to see and do everything in the game. The dialogue is fantastic, the enemies are inventive and cool, the graphics and music are incredible, and the story and characters are the best in any game ever.

Truthfully, even after tasting the sweetness of Mother 3, I’d still give my left nut for the N64 original to complete its development.

Or at least play it for myself.

earthbound is profound simply because of the setting in both the game and reality because at the time the only rpgs were mid evil set games where earthbound was modeled after hitting shit with baseball bats in a western setting in order to stop the world from ending because of a cosmic destroyer. Now if that isn’t a fucking acid induced idea of brilliance, then i don’t know what is.

What the EFF is up with Nintendo and ignoring greatness? If they know that they have tons of fan’s clamoring for certain games to be available to BUY how hard can it be to pull some string’s honestly!?! Earthbound is one of the few games that I actually want to buy- it’s a masterpiece… and I never owned it long enough to beat it.

Plus- it can’t be pirated either I think. They implemented something to the effect where it froze on the final boss if it was a ripped copy.

They’re also really starting to tick me off like crazy with SMRPG. We’ve been waiting for them to do something with it… it’s not like they’re in competition with Square-Enix right? How am I supposed to make a fan comic based on a game that half my friends never heard of when it’s not even available to the general public?!
http://teamsketch.com/comics/smrpg/smrpg.html

Sadly, Earthbound fans are not a big group. The are a very vocal and devoted group. But probably not big enough to get big sales from a release of Earthbound 3 as a retail product.

However, as a digital distribution title, Nintendo would be stupid to not release it. I would gladly buy any of the Mother trilogy on the VC or as Wiiware games.

“Sadly, Earthbound fans are not a big group. The are a very vocal and devoted group. But probably not big enough to get big sales from a release of Earthbound 3 as a retail product.”

I think this is a good point and it’s crossed my mind many times… but it’s hard to accept when NoA is willing to localize things like Magical Starsign that sold poorly and, well, sucked.

The 30,000 or so diehard EB fans that would have bought a Mother 3 translation is probably higher than the amount of Magical Starsign purchasers. I can think of a few other DS and GBA titles they bothered with (all of which had good amounts of translation to do) that suffered the same fate.

I don’t know how they can justify that and decide to skip over something that there is actually already a group of fans for.

“it seems like Nintendo can’t ignore the results of this poll”

They can and they will. They’ve been ignoring their player base for years.

@Gogiguy

No, it’s not just you even according to a certain faux Belmont.

I just couldn’t get into it either; it just didn’t do it for me. D’oh well. At least there are tons of RPGs on the SNES

Anyone else get the feeling that the VC is being woefully ignored right now? Every week I get my hopes up and every week I shake my head in disbelief at the lack of quality titles being offered.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of VC titles but it seems like there is a moratorium on releasing titles that people are asking for. I have a couple of theories that I was looking for feedback on.

(1) Nintendo is trying to shift focus to WiiWare

(2) Nintendo has seen the sales numbers, done a cost analysis and decided to let the VC die a slow painful demise.

(3) Nintendo realizes that people are running out of storage space and will announce some solution at E3, followed by a flood of awesome releases.

I’m praying for the last theory…

@DeAngelo Guillory

I’m not hugely familar with every little detail of the games, but to me it seems like what they did was take Earthbound 64’s story, and turned it into Mother 3 on the GBA. Though, I say that just because it has Cliff and your characters dog in a lot of the videos.

A likely argument from Nintendo: “What’s the point? Starmen.net screwed up the poll.”
Rebuttal: “So if the amount of players who want the game are minority, how come no other game surmounted Mother 1 and 2 on the top 10?”

You’d figure that if the games were unpopular, Starmen.net’d be a drop in teh bucket compared to any other gaming website.

RE: Samus

Nice name. I think the practical answer is number 1. We are looking at the WiiWare launch t-minus 10 days and counting. I can’t for the life of me explain the dwindling of weekly titles however (use to always be three, even four on occasion, then went to two for the most part and an occasional ONE now). Still, overall the VC is beaucoup bucks for Nintendo as they have to making almost pure profit on the system. With it being a major selling point for the Wii, I can’t imagine your second scenario being even remotely true. Even though Iwata said he was disappointed with the latest VC sales, that could simply be his perfectionist nature and the law of diminishing returns. I would think if they threw up two or three of that top 5 from Nintendo Power, they’d see a serious spike in downloads.

Being in a PAL country, it would be nice to be able to play the games that never made it over here.

Like the earthbounds and the Mario RPG’s.

I think they are keeping the quality VC games to merely trickling in because they don’t want to occupy Wii owners with too much awesomeness at one time. Could you imagine Wii game publishers adjusting their release dates based on VC game debuts?

“Let’s not try to compete with Earthbound’s VC release date, boys. We may need to wait another month before shipping the new Zelda title.”

That said, when Pilotwings becomes available, I may never need to buy another game again.

as long as it’s not falce hope i’m happy….

Yeah,
Earthbound wasn’t released in Europe. I would love to see this “Japan/US”-only game (as defined by SSBM) come out here

They should put Terranigma on the Virtual Console. After Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia of course.

Geez, I got Earthbound for 7 bucks at a used electronic store, and a relative gave me a copy of the strategy guide. You don’t HAVE to pay 60 dollars for it if you try hard enough.

eBay is for quitters.

If you goto the ERSB rating website http://www.esrb.org/ratings/search.jsp and then do a search for “Earthbound” You’ll find that it comes up rated for the “Wii”.

So the question is, is it Virtual Console time, or a new game…..

@Redbox

Supposedly, the game was to be released last July or something. That might be the reason for the rating.

my vote for most wanted is TMNT II and III

I’m not hugely familar with every little detail of the games, but to me it seems like what they did was take Earthbound 64’s story, and turned it into Mother 3 on the GBA. Though, I say that just because it has Cliff and your characters dog in a lot of the videos.

No offense, but one of my pet peeves in life is when people tell me information I’ve been fully aware of as though they felt they’ve done me a favor.

It’s not that I’m insinuating you’re insulting my intelligence (though I do and will react as though that people are), but I have been following the information for the game as far back into 1997.

Also his name is FLINT.

yes i need a keyboard for WII

This is annoying. EVERY Smash Bros. game has some kind of Mother reference, and yet they completely refuse to re-realease Earthbound/Mother in Japan or the US. If they aren’t going to realease for Virtual Console, why not make a new game or fix up Earthbound 2 or 3 to work on the DS? It’s probably the same reason they won’t re-realease Kid Icarus or Ice Climbers. Why would they put characters that NO ONE born around the end of SNES will know in one of the most popular games on the Wii? So they will come back to life? SSBM helped release Fire Emblem which wasn’t a big thing at all in the USA. Barely anyone outside of Japan knew it existed, and a game that actually a lot of people like, they won’t realease! What’s the point of making people go, “*After reading Earthbound Description” hey this game sounds fun, I want to play it.” Just so they’ll buy a SNES and hope they find the game they were looking for, and once they finish the game, they stop playing the SNES, not knowing of any of the other games. (Unless they bothered checking for other versions of the game.)