Amiibo to start unlocking NES and SNES games! Kind of…

Those Nintendo figures you’ve been stockpiling will soon be able to do more than unlock new costumes and kick your own butt in Super Smash Bros. According to Nintendo, they’ll actually be able to open up parts of classic games for play on the Wii U.

Speaking at a financial briefing, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said that the new feature will come by way of an app that Wii U gamers can download. Operation is just about as simple as you might imagine too, with just a tap of an Amiibo on the GamePad necessary to open up a part of an NES or SNES title. There is a catch though, and that’s that the game unlocked will only play for a short period of time, so it’s not like you can tap your Amiibo and then play through a whole game. Though it should be mentioned that anther tap of the figure will activate a different section of the game in question, whatever that might be.

Iwata says the idea here is to mimic the swapping of carts that used to take place on the classic Nintendo consoles, when gamers would pop in and out cartridges on the fly and play games in rapid fire. Personally, I don’t see it. I understand the idea just fine, but playing a little section of a game just doesn’t seem like a lot of… fun. With no way to get into the game or really be playing for anything (since you can’t beat it or anything), the whole mechanic seems kind of useless.

I guess it’s a cool idea in that it looks like the app will be free, so there’s that. Even free though, I just don’t see myself using it. What say you?

Source: Polygon