While the wait continues for back catalogue titles to arrive Nintendo Switch, owners of the Chinese version of Nvidia’s Shield have been playing a quartet of Wii games for the last few months. These are entirely official emulated titles co-developed by both Nintendo and Nvidia, and as the same Tegra X1 processor powers Shield and Switch alike, we have to wonder: is this our first look at how games like Super Mario Galaxy may look and play on the hybrid console? If so, we’re in for a real treat.
First of all, it’s worth pointing out just how difficult it is to access these games, even if you already own an Nvidia Shield device. Accessing the title requires a Chinese console (the way we did it) or else visiting Nvidia’s Github, downloading and compiling the Chinese version of the operating system and then flashing your console. We attempted the latter but gave up owing to the sheer amount of work required to get the simplest of tasks done. Getting a machine sent across from China actually turned out to be a lot easier and faster.
Once you have the hardware situation resolved, the only way to access the software is via a VPN, while actually paying for the games requires using Chinese social media platforms WeChat or Alipay, where a Chinese credit card is mandatory. The bottom line: accessing the software is incredibly difficult. Getting your hands on these titles is difficult and while we’ve been very keen on testing Shield’s Wii emulator for months now, it’s been a long road getting to this point and it requires having friends in China to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Source: Eurogamer Hands-on with Super Mario Galaxy at 1080p on Nintendo's official Wii emulator