https://www.polygon.com/2017/6/26/158739...t-of-games
This is a big one here. I already owned all the games on the NES Classic, so I only bought one for my niece. However, the SNES Classic has one game I don't own, Star Fox 2! That's right, the cancelled one!
There is a ROM floating around of an incomplete version. It was recently confirmed in an interview that Nintendo has a fully complete version of the game, in English. In other words, there's a very good chance that's the version we're going to see.
So why announce this now, and not at E3? That's kind of odd... but anyway, it's nice to see that they are making this, and I hope it is more available than the NES Classic was. The big news, though, is that Star Fox 2 is going to be in the thing! That's awesome and if it is the complete version of the game, it makes me interested in the SNES Classic for sure... I do have most of those games; I don't have Super Punch-Out, Earthbound, Super Mario RPG, Street Fighter II Turbo, or Final Fantasy III, but those last two don't matter because I have FFVI for the GBA and SSFII for SNES and SFIISCE for Genesis (and SFII'CE for PCE as well...), which cover those two games pretty well. I would like to play Mario RPG sometime though, but the SNES version is expensive and I've never gotten it on Virtual Console or such, or even played much of it in an emulator. Of the five games there I don't own Mario RPG is the most interesting one for me. As for those first two though, I've never played a Punch-Out game (or, as far as I can remember, any boxing game) and don't want to, so I don't care about that one. Earthbound I doubt I'd like and I wouldn't buy this just for that. And yeah, the rest are games I have and, in many cases, have finished... but an exclusive, complete version of Star Fox II? I might need to get this for that...
Earthbound is one of the most well-written games ever made. The fact that the translator managed to capture the sense of the original so well (according to another translator, Mato) is a miracle, considering the state of many translations during that era. Frankly, if you value solid writing as I think you do based on your love of Planescape Torment, you're doing yourself a disservice skipping out on this game.
Oh, and by the way, I just realized I don't actually own any of the SNES ports of Street Fighter. I sorta didn't really feel like buying inferior ports when there's arcade perfect ports on modern consoles, so I got a modern version.
I'm pretty sure they didn't bother announcing this at E3 because they don't want to announce everything at E3 and also this is basically just a "side dish" as far as Nintendo is concerned.
I hope that this version of Star Fox 2 becomes available off of this device; I know that they've never done a Super FX emulator for consoles and their Switch VC policy is still unknown, but now that they're finally going to re-release the game, it would be a shame if it's locked to this limited-availability thing!
It would be a shame, I agree. Porting Super FX emulation to other consoles shouldn't prove too difficult, but with the Switch's VC support still a way off, there's no telling. If nothing else, you can certainly expect this version to be ripped off the hardware fairly soon after the device launches. In fact, if I manage to obtain one, I'll do the job myself so long as the same exploit that worked on the NES Classic applies. I plan on sticking the ROM on a custom ROM chip and swapping out the chip in some Super FX 2 game (like the SNES version of Doom, perhaps) so I can play it on original hardware.