News Of The Day: Mario Tennis On Wii Virtual Console?!

Thanks to Ben’s post of his top five NES games over on The Cool Kid’s Table, I decided to check and see if Bubble Bobble (his #5) was on the Wii Virtual Console. Now, I’m not that big of a Wii fan. We have one, but when I get the itch to play some video games, 99% of the time I head for my 360, but now that I know that both Bubble Bobble and my beloved Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64 are available on the VC, I think I might be spending a little more time with my Wii. Neither of these bits of information are particularly new to the world, but they’re new to me.

See, in college, I was in a fraternity. It wasn’t what you think of as a fraternity, but a genuinely great group of guys coming together to try and do something good for each other, ourselves and the community. We also loved to played video games. To us, the number one “running around and shooting people” game wasn’t Halo 2, but Red Faction 2, a game I still enjoy to this day. But we also had an N64 in the basement that we used mostly to play Mario Tennis. It was a ridiculously fun and nuanced game that was easy to play but difficult to master. We even started holding a tournament every year that my roommate and I came pretty damn close to winning (unless my memory is making us out to be better than we were, though I do remember Team Awesome being fairly hard to beat). The Game Cube version added way too much nonsense with super crazy powerful hits and what not and left me feeling disappointed, but I am absolutely overjoyed to discover that I can go back to those wonderful courts with Boo and Shy Guy. Time to get some of those Wii points I guess and get back in like with my Wii.