by Chris SelogyThis week's featured game is Earthbound for the Wii U's Virtual Console.
Nintendo saved this week's show with the surprise release of SNES cult classic Earthbound for the Wii U's Virtual Console this past Thursday. This RPG begins with the crash of a mysterious meteor that sets off the young Ness on a big adventure to find out what's going on in the town of Onett and its neighboring areas. Earthbound was one of those games that seemed destined to never be available officially on Virtual Console due to issues with some of the music sampling popular songs, but Nintendo has somehow figured out the issues to give fans one of their most requested games since the Virtual Console started on the original Wii. I've never played an official copy of the game before due to supply issues back in the day and the weird box art not grabbing me whenever I browsed my local rental store's SNES selection, so its release this week was great news for me after initially having interest in trying it out via emulation just before Nintendo announced its upcoming release earlier this year.
It's a good thing that Nintendo had the surprise release of Earthbound this week since there was nothing else to feature with the current drought that is going on. Next week will probably featured Stealth Inc. A Clone in the Dark for the PS3, which kicks off Sony's PlayStation Store Play promotion for the next four weeks. The August 3 show will likely feature Cloudberry Kingdom for the PS3 with is the second game in that Sony PSN promotion. August 10 will most likely be a Pikmin 3 show with the highly anticipated release of Nintendo's biggest game since the Wii U's launch last November. It seems that the great content drought of July 2013 is over, so we should have an easier time finding games to cover for the rest of the year.
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