EARTHBOUND!

[Dark Jaguar]

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Nintendo released it! It is exclusive to Wii U, unfortunately, and they have a bad habit of charging twice if you want the game on both your 3DS and Wii U, so even if they do release it on 3DS later on...

Anyway! The game should be mostly unaltered, except they applied a "softening" sort of filter to the battle effects out of concern for photosensitive people out there.

http://earthbound.nintendo.com/

They even went the extra mile. That web site has an HTML version of the player's guide which has been custom fit for the Wii U gamepad, so you can peruse the guide using the same controller you're playing the game on.

If you would prefer to have the guide on an e-reader, the European site has a PDF version you can stick on something like an iPad.
http://cdn02.nintendo-europe.com/media/d...ide_EN.pdf

They went and did it, and I love 'em for it!

[A Black Falcon]

Well, no worries about charging twice for 3DS so far, there are no SNES VC games on 3DS... but yeah, it's great that it finally re-released. Too bad it's Wii U only and not also Wii, but ah well, it's not like I have any plans of getting it anywya.

[Dark Jaguar]

All the same, I hope it sells really well. Also, I hope it kills off the insane price of Earthbound cartridges.

[A Black Falcon]

Hah... yes, I most definitely agree that I hope it reduces the crazy costs Earthbound carts have gotten up to. :)

[Dark Jaguar]

Massively reduced demand for the next XBox has caused a lot of people to start picking up the Wii U, though that may have been a very short lived burst of sales.

Anyway, I have one tidbit. The Player's Guide for Earthbound available for download from Nintendo appears completely unaltered. This is great, except for one bit of bad intel the guide has. You can't get a Gutsy bat from a Kraken! The odds were pretty terrible to begin with, but that particular enemy doesn't drop it. The enemy that actually drops the item is the Bionic Kraken. This was reverse engineered from the game's own code, so there ya go. Otherwise, the guide is very accurate.

http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/11/the...-is-a-lie/

I'm hoping to help any perfectionists among you from wasting time looking for this item in the wrong place.

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh yes, originally Earthbound was rated "K-A". That's... Kids to Adults. They don't use that rating any more, it has been replaced with "E". The ratings board rerated the game "E" to match current standards a few years ago for Wii, a release we never saw.

For some reason, they've rated it again, and now it is rated T. What the heck?

Edit: I did some research consisting of leafing through my old games.

Killer Instinct for SNES: Rated T. Yes, Killer Instinct, KILLER INSTINCT, is rated T. So is Killer Instinct Gold on N64.

Chrono Trigger on SNES is rated K-A (again, the old version of an E rating). Chrono Trigger on Nintendo DS is rated E.
Final Fantasy II (IV, as you all know) on SNES is unrated as it was released before ratings. On the Playstation, Final Fantasy IV was bundled with Chrono Trigger, the package was rated T, even though neither individual game should have warrented it. Granted, the Playstation version of FFIV did receive a brand new translation, but Chrono Trigger still had the same one there.
Both the PSP and DS remasters of Final Fanstasy IV are rated "E" again. (Actually, a somewhat new rating of E10, but certainly not a T.)

All of this leads to one inescapable conclusion. The ESRB has no idea what the hell they are doing.

[A Black Falcon]

Huh, that's weird. Why?

[Dark Jaguar]

I'm honestly not sure, check my edited post above for more weird details though.

[A Black Falcon]

That is quite strange, yeah. Why the random rating changes? Do the additional descriptors add any information?

[Dark Jaguar]

Want to really be confused? There are no additional descriptors. The descriptors used for this revision of the rating exactly match the descriptors used for the scrapped "Wii" release.

[Dark Jaguar]

After the discussion on Nintendo's incomplete emulators, I wanted to add one thing. Earthbound is in no way "special" when it comes to hardware. It is a standard SNES game on a standard SNES with no addon support at all, nor did it need any of that. As a result, Nintendo's emulator did a fine job with the game with nothing really overlooked. The only issues are occasional graphical glitches, as expected from an emulator that needs to run on the Wii U's processor. There's simply no way something as accurate as BSNES would be capable of running very well at all on such hardware.

[Dark Jaguar]

Itoi had a few things to say about the game: http://earthbound.nintendo.com/message/

Wow, all I can say to that is that's exactly what I'd expect from the person who wrote the game itself.