NES Classic Edition | Review

Developer: Nintendo

Distributor: Nintendo

Released: November 11^th 2016

Nintendo recently released the Mini NES (officially known as the NES Classic Edition or Nintendo Classic Mini in Europe) and just like what happened when Amiibo first went on sale, it went out of stock instantaneously. I must have been particularly good last year because I was given one for Christmas and after spending a bit of time with it, I wanted to share my thoughts.

This is going to be a slightly differently formatted review to usual as I'm used to reviewing games but this will be my first time reviewing a piece of gaming hardware. The reason I wanted to do this review is because you may want more information about the product before spending what could be quite a lot of money on it.

A lot of what I'll be writing here you'll probably have already heard by now (after all, it's been out for a while) but I figured, why not write my own opinion seeing as I now have a Mini NES in my grasp.

The Mini NES is tiny when compared to it's older brother, it's about half as high and 40% less wide and long.

The first thing you'll notice when you get a Mini NES is how good the outer packaging is, it's remenisent of an old school NES box and you can tell Nintendo were really trying to capture that feeling of nostalgia with all their branding and marketing. Then, after opening the box, you'll notice how tiny and adorable the actual console is, it's smaller than an NES cartridge for god's sake! It's adorable!

The controller supplied is very good quality and feels exactly like an NES controller, they really did a good job with nailing that true NES feeling. However, despite how good the actual controller is, perhaps the biggest and most common complaint I've seen about the Mini NES is the fact that the controller's wire is really short. It's far too short for gaming in a moderatly sized room and you have to position yourself ridiculously close to the TV unless you move the console closer to you. Even after doing that I found myself having to sit on the floor. It's unacceptably short. Extension cables do exist which is good, but you shouldn't need any external hardware to get a plug 'n' play console to function properly. In the room where my Mini NES now resides, I have to plug it in near my chair and run an extra long HDMI cable to the TV (on the opposite side of the room) if I want to play it comfortably.

A comparison between an original NES controller and a new Mini NES controller. The original NES controller had a much, much longer wire. Why make a new controller with a shorter wire?

Perhaps an obvious solution to this problem would have been if the controllers were wireless, but personally I wouldn't have liked having a wireless NES controller. The entire purpose of the Mini NES is to be remeniscent of an actual NES and plugging a controller in was a part of that experience, having a wireless controller would have cheapened that a little bit for me personally. Nintendo should have made the wire about four times longer and then everyone would have been happy.

If you want to partake in some multiplayer on the games which have that feature, you'll obviously need a second controller, and disapointingly the Mini NES only comes with one. Extra controllers can be purchased but they can be expensive due to them being in such high demand. However, because of the Mini NES using a Wii input for it's controllers (rather than the actual NES controller inputs) you can use the controllers which are compatible with the original Wii (to be clear, you can't use Wiimotes or GameCube controllers but the wired Classic Controller and Classic Controller Pro which were plugged into the bottom of the Wiimote are compatible with the Mini NES, it's confusing I know). Really the Mini NES should have just come with two controllers so every bit of content is available to everyone.

The input on the Mini NES being the same as the input on a Wiimote means you can play the NES games on your Wii and Wii U with the new NES Mini controller for added authenticity.

The Mini NES is powered by a micro USB cable which goes from the back of the NES to any USB port. More than likely you'll have a USB port on your TV so the Mini NES can actually be powered by your TV rather than plugging it into a wall socket. Then you're also supplied with a good quality HDMI cable which obviously also runs from the Mini NES to the TV.

After that quick set up, you're ready to turn it on and get playing! Upon turning the Mini NES on, you'll be greeted with a home screen which displays all 30 games that are available to play (they're all pre-installed). I love how quickly the Mini NES boots up, you can turn it on and be playing one of the games in about two seconds, there's no loading sequences and no waiting around. It's great to see something like this in a time where you have lengthy loading times, booting sequences and endless updates and patches on modern game consoles.

As well as having access to the library of games you also have a settings menu in which you can change the video filter to a CRT mode (where it replicates being played on an old TV), a 4:3 mode and a pixel perfect mode. You're going to want to use the pixel perfect mode for most of the time you use the Mini NES and the rest are just there as a gimmick more than anything, but it's nice to mess around with. The only other settings you can change are very basic, like displaying a demo if the Mini NES is left alone for a while, automatically shutting down after a period of inactivity and screen burn reduction options. You also have language settings and legal notices which are quite boring.

One thing that's very annoying about the Mini NES is that there's an option to view the original manuals for the games but you need to scan a QR code on your phone to do so. Why were the manuals not just view-able on the Mini NES itself? They would have been interesting to scroll through on a big screen but instead they are confined to a QR code that I doubt many people will even scan. It would have been even better to have printed copies of some of the manuals that come with the Mini NES but that might be asking too much in an age where proper manuals are non-existent.

The games on the main menu are ordered alphabetically, it's a bit of a shame you can't customise the order but that's a nitpick. The bar at the top of the screen is where you change your display settings and go through the boring options like language and reducing screen burn.

In order to return to the home screen you have to press the reset button which is on the front of the Mini NES console. Some people have complained about this, saying that a quick way of getting to the home screen should have been implemented (like having a home button on the NES controller) but I actually like what Nintendo were trying to do with this. They were trying to replicate the feeling of having to get up and put another cartridge into the NES by forcing you to walk to the console and press the button. This could potentially be why the controller wire is so short too, to replicate the feeling of being a kid and sitting close to the TV and to give you easier access to the reset button on the console, but if that's the reason for the short wires then I think they went a bit too far with capturing nostalgia. However, I do like the reset button being on the console, I like that it replicates playing on a real NES and I like that the Mini NES controller is kept exactly the same as a proper NES controller. The addition of a home button on the Mini NES controller would have taken away from the feeling of legitimacy that the Mini NES has. If you're using a Wii Classic Controller or a Wii Classic Controller Pro you can use the home button on these controllers to bring you back to the home screen on the Mini NES, so there is an option for people who can't or don't want to be getting up all the time (although, unless you already have one of these controllers, it will result in you needing to buy one).

I think it's time to talk about one of the obvious things the Mini NES gets spot on, the selection of games. Almost all thirty of the games featured on the Mini NES are great, they range from early NES games like Balloon Fight and Super Mario Bros. to arcade ports like Pac-Man and Bubble Bobble to some later era games such as Ninja Gaiden and Kirby's Adventure. The selection is varied and you're able to sink a substantial amount of time into almost all of them if you enjoy NES games. This is pretty much a 'best of' NES games collection and considering the price it would cost to get some of these games on a cartridge it really is amazing value for money (that is considering the RRP of £50, not the prices the Mini NES is going for on second hand selling sites, whether it's worth those sorts of prices is down to your own opinion). Not only is it cheaper than getting the games on cartridges but it's also substantially cheaper than getting them digitally on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console and you get a controller and console on top of that.

Nintendo have been known to struggle with emulating their own games in the past. The Wii and Wii U have had several emulation problems resulting in dark and generally unappealing picture quality and the 50hz versions being available instead of the superior 60hz versions. I'm happy to report that this isn't a problem on the Mini NES, the emulation quality is absolutely perfect. Everything is colourful and runs at a good speed and yeah, sometimes there is some slow-down in hectic areas and some minor visual glitches but these 'problems' exist even when playing on a cartridge. I don't find this to be a problem and it's more of a good thing that the games feel like they used to on a proper NES.

This is a Wii Classic Controller Pro which can be used with the Mini NES and is a good alternative to the Mini NES controller because of how expensive they are right now. The home button acts as the reset button too so it has a functionality that the Mini NES controller doesn't.

One of the greatest selling points of the Mini NES for someone living in a European PAL region (like me) is that the games on the Mini NES are displayed at 60hz rather than the original NES's 50hz display. For those that don't know what that means, it basically means that because of the way that old TV screens displayed images (at 50hz) the original NES in Europe played games at a slower speed than the American NES (approximately 20% slower, which is a substantial amount). The original NES in American NTSC regions could run at a much higher speed because their TVs displayed images at 60hz which meant that games looked smoother and generally played better. But now, by playing games on the Mini NES, people in European PAL regions can enjoy NES games in 60hz, as they were originally intended to be played. This may seem like an unimportant detail but for someone who loves playing NES games this is a huge deal, this is the first time that people in PAL regions have been able to play these games at in their 60hz form in an official capacity. Obviously you could import games and emulate them before, but the Mini NES allows you to play them for cheaper (than the cost of importing an NES console and games) and without setting up emulators on your PC.

Having said that the game selection is great I would like to point out that even though most of the thirty games are well worth your time, there isn't any way for the Mini NES to download or play more games. There's no SD Card slot to import new games, there's no cartridge slot to play your old NES cartridges and there's no online store to purchase new games. This is slightly disappointing especially when you consider the Sega Mega Drive Classic Console (or Sega Genesis Classic Console in America) has 80 games pre-installed and has a cartridge slot so you can officially play your old games too. It would have been amazing for the Mini NES to have been slightly bigger to accommodate NES cartridges and it would have massively expanded it's usability.

An NES cartridge is slightly longer and wider than the Mini NES. As nice as that is I would have rather the Mini NES been slightly bigger and able to play cartridges.

Not only is there no way of playing more games than the 30 pre-installed ones but some quite notable games are absent from the collection. Games like Tetris, Bionic Commando, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, Contra, Batman and Ducktales aren't available and while I understand licensing issues may have stopped the last two from being included, there's no valid reason for the others not to be in the collection. But I suppose no matter how many games were in the selection someone would have been complaining that a certain game wasn't included. But still, a 'best of' collection of NES games without Tetris? Just seems a bit odd to me.

One of the last negative things I have to say about the Mini NES is that a very large portion of it's library aren't actually NES games, they're ports of arcade games (11 out of 30 of the games featured on the Mini NES are originally arcade games). While some people will probably be annoyed that there aren't more 'true' NES games (games developed from the ground up for the NES), I don't find this to be a problem because the arcade ports are fantastic for the most part and to have not included them would have resulted in quite a few classic NES games being absent. But it's something I thought I would mention.

The Mini NES controller feels identical to the original NES controller which is fantastic and combined with the Mini NES itself makes it a much better alternative to PC emulation.

For me, the Mini NES is well worth the price and definitely worth looking into when it's less in demand and when shops are actually stocking them again. The 30 games included are mostly all great and it's a fantastic introduction to retro gaming for people that haven't ever played a proper NES or that don't have an NES anymore. It even has some advantages over the original NES with it's save state function and the fact that it looks much clearer and runs at 60hz because of it's HDMI display output. It's an absolute must have for anyone who likes retro gaming but doesn't have the money to purchase all the games in their original format. I'm excited about the idea of a SNES Classic Edition and hopefully Nintendo would fix some (if not all) of the issues seen with the Mini NES if a Mini SNES ever came to fruition.

The last thing I'll say about the Mini NES is that before you buy one, make sure you also buy a controller extension cable, a second controller (and a second controller extension cable) and a USB to AC adapter if you want to plug the Mini NES into a wall socket. It's very annoying that these things weren't included in the package but even after adding the price of these things on top of the cost of the Mini NES I would still say it's well worth it (This is assuming you are getting the Mini NES at it's RRP, not from a second hand shop or selling site).

Pros:

- Great selection of games that's varied and spans the entire lifespan of the NES.

- It's very well priced considering how expensive buying NES cartridges is. The Mini NES is cheaper than buying the games digitally on the Virtual Console too.

- The modernised display settings and save state function adds just enough modern functions while still feeling like a retro console.

- The replica NES controller and the reset button on the console adds an element of legitimacy to the Mini NES and makes it feel like an actual retro NES.

- Games run at 60hz meaning that PAL regions can finally play NES games at their proper speed.

Cons:

- No more than 30 games are playable, no cartridge slot, no online store and no method of getting more games on there with removable media either.

- Some notable games are strangely absent. Especially the ones where some of the series is in the collection but some are missing (Castlevania III and Contra).

- Short controller cable length is infuriating, though extensions do exist.

- It only comes with one controller.
- Manuals are only accessible by scanning a QR code. Rather than simply being available on the Mini NES you have to use a phone to access them.