My borrowed copy of Metroid Prime Remastered is a few days overdue, so I’ve been powering through the game in an effort to be a good library card holder. Time crunch aside, I’m having a great time with it, and I'm a little sad about the prospect of finishing Samus' first foray into the third-dimension. After all, none of her other adventures in 3D are available on modern hardware.
For a long time, it seemed like they would be. Rumors swirled for years that Nintendo was planning to release a remastered trilogy on the Switch, with some even claiming that it was already complete and that the company was just sitting on it until the time was right. It isn't completely out of the realm of possibility. Nintendo does do that kind of thing sometimes. Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp was delayed a year past its planned release date with a vague reference to “recent world events” as rationale, but it seems increasingly likely that’s not the case here.
It’s possible that the company has three completed remasters and is parceling them out slowly as a bread crumb trail leading up to Retro's long-gestating Metroid Prime 4. Maybe they were done years ago and Metroid Prime 4’s development hell threw the games into limbo. It’s possible that we’ll get Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in the next year or so to coincide with the new game. But, I’m resigning myself to the idea that it’s not going to happen. Better to not be disappointed.
That’s a real bummer, because Metroid Prime is really good and I don’t have an easily accessible way to play the sequels after I finish it. I had a Wii and a GameCube at some point, but not at my home in Illinois. So, if I want to play Metroid Prime 2, I'll need to emulate it or track down 20 year old hardware.
It points to a frustrating aspect of Nintendo's approach to its older games in the Switch era. On the Wii, 3DS, and Wii U, the company offered a Virtual Console where games from throughout Nintendo history were frequently added for purchase a la carte. But, with Nintendo's pivot to Nintendo Switch Online, the only way to play old games is by purchasing a subscription. And, if you want to play GameCube games, you're out of luck. Currently, you can only play select Nintendo games from the NES, SNES, Game Boy, and a more expensive subscription gains you access to N64, Game Boy Advance, and Sega Genesis, too.
If you want to play anything from the last 20-plus years of Nintendo history, your only hope is a remaster for the Switch. The subscription era has invented a bunch of new problems for movie and TV lovers, and in gaming, we have the same issue, but worse. If you want to watch an old movie that isn't on streaming, you may be able to find it on VOD and, if not, you can almost certainly find it on Blu-Ray or DVD and watch it on your TV without issue. But, if you want to play an old game, you’re out of luck unless you purchase potentially expensive hardware.
As graphics and load times and storage space and game size have increased, it's easy to feel like we've come a long way. But, like Samus discovering a shortcut, we may not have traveled very far from where we started.