Apparently, I'm not the only guy who thought eight dollars for Altered Beast on the Wii was criminal. My solution? Throwing a hissyfit on my sofa and buying it anyway. This guy? He found an old hack to load emulators, bypassing Wii micropayments forever. Virtual Console just got served, Shasta McNasty style.

A clever fox named NitrousXP used a five year old hack to run vintage games using a GameCube Action Replay disk. In this instructional video, he simply loads the software from SDLoad with pirated roms sitting in his flash card, then effortlessly illustrates how to play Super Nintendo games not yet available on the Wii VC (using SNES9X).  Surely, more emulators also work with this hack for the uber impatient and loose of morals. That's so dirty!

The hack doesn't require any modding and the components easy to find; roughly $50 total. Apparently the program is also capable of making the virtual GameCube part of your LAN and loading roms from a network path with a broadband adapter. Check out this Wiki about it. Double dirty!

Is Virtual Console doomed? Nah. Morality, lazyness, obscurity, and sheer usability will spare Nintendo's retro project. I'm writing this off as an odd hack that only dastardly Sony fanboys will employ. But it's a sign of trouble to come -- especially since VC still doesn't have a single good Mario title and Nintendo is being annoyingly strategic about releasing games on it. If this hack does take off and the demand for emulation is that high, it will be their own damn fault.

Hey Reggie, hurry up -- a mob is forming.

[ via Kotaku ]