SEGA Retro Classics, 4 Elements & More Now Available via Nintendo eShop

This week’s headline release on the Nintendo eShop is surely Animal Crossing: New Leaf. As this title won’t be available til midnight tonight however, it’s SEGA’s retro feast that steals the frontpage. Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Shining Force: Sword of Haiya and Columns are all available to download for the Nintendo 3DS now.

[LOL_WUT]

I wish it was available for the Wii U i'd buy it ;)

[MartinB105]

Those Genesis games are EXPENSIVE.

You can buy Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection new for around $10-$15 on PS3 or 360, which contains around 40 games including all the Genesis games listed here, plus tons of extra content and achievements/trophies.

The "Nintendo Tax" is ridiculous on these versions.

[Shinobi100]

Those are Game Gear games, not Genesis games. Only digital versions of these games in existence is the eShop

[MartinB105]

Good catch! That makes the deal even worse. Is there really a good reason that the 3DS cannot run the far superior Genesis versions of those games?

Nintendo have a track-record of pulling this kind of crap on the Wii VC. They had bad NES conversions of arcade games instead of original arcade versions (e.g. Bubble Bobble), NES versions of the Mario games despite them being remade in much better SNES version in Super Mario All-Stars and Commodore 64 games that were completely broken with poor emulation (Mayhem in Monsterland) and even one VC game that just crashed after the first level (Last Ninja III).

I own both Wii and Wii U and I don't buy anything on VC because it's such a bad service and poor value for money. I'll just stick with emulators until Nintendo decide to get their act together.

[beakeroo1]

This Animal Crossing game is taking sooooo long to download. 25% in 4 hours with zero other downloads on the network and a 10mb bandwidth. I know the game has just been released and the servers are probably getting hammered but this kind of thing would potentially drive new digital customers away.