Last minute Wii U purchases (also RIP)

Much like the 3DS eshop the Wii U one will be shut down by the end of this month. I don‘t know about y’all but I‘m an advocate of the console, and I enjoyed the breadth of the Virtual Console selection despite some of the emulator issues. There’s a hefty selection of NES, SNES, N64, GBA, Turbografx, DS and Wii games, not to mention the library of original releases.

Given that the store will be soon closed for purchase, what are the Insert Credit recommendations that people have before the shop is put to rest?
For my money, I can immediately recommend the Wii U version of the Metroid Prime Trilogy, Sin and Punishment, and currently the only official release of the first Mother game (Earthbound Beginnings). There's also the two Fire Emblem games and Metroid Fusion to start off with, but I also notice the likes of Onimusha Tactics and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance too.

I'm not overly familiar with non-VC games for the system but any and all recommendations welcome!

Edit: It's not dead yet (thanks for clarifying @billy)!

If Zelda is anyone's thing then the eShop COULD SAVE YOU MONEY on Wind Waker ($75 second-hand) and Twilight Princess HD ($200+ second-hand)

Oh shit, the 3DS eShop’s going down?? That’s honestly a lot more concerning to me since so many of the games there are platform-exclusive and unlikely to be ported anytime soon.

afaik the only true must-plays left on Wii U that haven’t been ported (regardless of whether the Wii U versions are debatably superior, e.g. _Pikmin 3_) are… _Xenoblade X_? That’s kinda it, that’s the last noteworthy exclusive left. Unless you count _Wind Waker HD_ or _Smash 4_… or _Devil’s Third_.

As far as Virtual Console stuff, in addition to the games mentioned Wii U is your last shot at playing Ogre Battle 64 and Super Mario RPG officially in the foreseeable future

Pinball Arcade, the only commercial game to include Adam‘s Family or Twilight Zone, was delisted from everything but Wii U years ago but it’s inexplicably still on the eShop there with most of the DLC still for sale

I don’t think the shop is actually closing. They’re just removing the option to pay by card on the console itself - you’ll still be able to make 3DS and WiiU eShop card purchases through the website (or on the console itself if you top up your account via the website).

Or am I wrong?

@"billy "#p53151 You‘re not wrong - I am! However I imagine that this is perhaps setting an early precedent for what’s to eventually come.

At the very least, we can be sure nothing will ever go on sale again…

@“LeFish”#p53154 maybe, but it could be a positive sign for the short/medium term that they’ve shut down (or stopped licensing) whatever legacy payment system they were using but have left the store itself open.

Anyway, the answer to the question is Pullblox World.

Oh man I haven‘t played it in a while, so I couldn’t tell you if it holds up, but there‘s a platformer called Roving Rogue that I really enjoyed. It’s essentially the same mechanic as Celeste, although the levels are more continuous than the individual screens. It does have more enemies (and I think you can knock them out from behind just by walking into them), and the story unfolds backwards, which is cool. I found it to be a really enjoyable and accessible precision platformer

https://youtu.be/Kw6R7kXw76g

Little Inferno. I guess it is also on Switch and other systems, but it plays great on the Wii U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMwl30A5Kok

'Ittle Dew 1 is also very fun Zelda clone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVj9MwfneJM

Affordable Space Adventures is a puzzle-y adventure game made by NapNok Games in collaboration with Nicklas Nygren aka Nifflas (Knytt Stories, etc) that was completely designed around the asymmetry of the tv/gamepad, and I don‘t believe the devs have even the slightest inclination of trying to port it anywhere else. Nifflas described it as his take on Steel Battalion, and I suppose that’s very loosely accurate.

(That studio made another Wii U exclusive called Spin the Bottle: Bumpie's Party, which is sort of like 1-2-Switch but with Wiimotes—that is to say, it barely works, but it's still somewhat interesting and not nearly as terrible as the title might suggest.)

These aren't recommendations, necessarily, but here are some noteworthy Virtual Console releases:

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    the GBA version of SMB3 (whatever the full title is, I‘ll never remember) not only includes the rare eReader-exclusive bonus stages but was modified by M2 to be able to have them all accessible at once, which isn’t possible with an authentic cartridge

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    the EU version of Drill Dozer uses an authentic, unreleased EFIGS-localised ROM from Nintendo's vault

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    the NES VC on Wii U includes several NES Zapper games which weren't available on Wii & aren't on Switch, which use the Wiimote pointer as a makeshift lightgun: Duck Hunt, Wild Gunman and Hogan's Alley, plus Konami's Adventures of Bayou Billy which has sections that could optionally be played with a Zapper.

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    the Mega Man Battle Network games, which have yet to be reissued anywhere else, are all on Wii U VC, and they did modify each game to unlock all bonus/trade-only items from the beginning (which lets you utterly break the games if you want to, or don't know any better)

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    Natsume USA put some of the GBA games they published on VC, most of which probably won't show up anywhere else any time soon: their two Medabots releases, Ancient's odd car-battling RPG Car Battler Joe! and the mediocre but excellently-named Pocky & Rocky with Becky (plus Harvest Moon ofc)

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    the vast majority of the TG16/PCE games released outside of Japan came well after the Switch was a thing, and there are some games there that must have sold in the dozens, the most inexplicable being the completely untranslated Jaseiken Necromancer

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    Mario Party DS is available but you can't play it in multiplayer so why bother

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    the N64 emulation can be very iffy depending on the game; I've forgotten most of the specifics, but I remember being immediately disgusted by the analogue controls on F-Zero X

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    Pac-Man 2's on there! I don't think they ever reissued it anywhere else (excluding some trashy plug-and-play, perhaps) and it's not going to be on the Pac-Man compilation scheduled for this year.

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    @"billy "#p53158 Anyway, the answer to the question is Pullblox World.

    AKA Pushmo World, for those who don't recognise the name—it's based on the first 3DS game but with all-new puzzles in the classic style, plus a bunch more with extra gimmicks that weren't present in the 3DS version. It also had puzzle sharing via Miiverse but that's obviously no longer an option, and I don't recall if there was any other way to manually exchange puzzles... you might be able to load them from jpegs via SD?

    Rumour has it that Intsys finished Crashmo World but it was shelved during the death rattle of the Wii U.

    @“2501”#p53148 Super Mario RPG is on the SNES classic! Can you still get those?

    Look. Listen. I‘m not saying that it is the greatest or even a good game but I love Devil’s Third. If you like the Simple 2000 series or 6/10 PS2 action games, get it. I really, really like it and despite knowing that it will never happen, I always hope that a Switch version will suddenly get announced during a Direct.

    @“fridgeboy”#p53238 Oh, possibly. I forgot about those. No idea if they’re still in production.

    @"gsk"#p53237 Never knew this stuff about some of the GBA VC games being modified to account for peripheral-exclusive content! Was this done for _Zelda: The Minish Cap_ or _Final Fantasy Tactics Advance_? (The latter being one of only three Square Enix VC games, alongside the ones mentioned in my previous post, ever released on Wii U outside Japan; all of them having originally been published by Nintendo.)

    @“Chopemon”#p53260 Yeah I endorse Devil’s Third lol. It is an endearingly chunky, janky B-game that got more hate than it deserved. The regular combat with its attempt to balance FPS and melee hack-n-slash mechanics is a mess, but the melee-focused boss fights are pretty fun and the aesthetics are appropriately wack, the kind of East-meets-West VHS gonzo action flick style you definitely only see in video games. The multiplayer was intriguing and it’s too bad Nintendo shut it down after like 6 months. Lord knows how they got into the position of agreeing to publish the game in the first place but they clearly weren’t thrilled about it.

    https://youtu.be/7yTldFe2m-A

    @“2501”#p53262 there was some weirdness like a week before release with Nintendo publishing wasn't there? I assume they picked it up so they had something at least to release on the platform but just before release word got out that they dropped it? Or it was listed without a publisher or something? And then last minute they suddenly put their name on it again.

    Unregardlessly, when it starts with him drumming in prison, it's pretty good.

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    @“Chopemon”#p53264 Unregardlessly, when it starts with him drumming in prison, it’s pretty good.

    Devil's Third has a more accurate respresentation of drumming than the movie "Whiplash". I climbed this hill, I'm ready to die on it

    @“Chopemon”#p53264 Not just any prison, but Guantanamo Bay…! Yeah. This game’s story is nuts.

    Ya'll are really pushing Devils Third up on the list of things I want to play. I bought and ripped the darn disk. I more and more love trash games.