Nvidia Shield gets official Nintendo support… in China

Nintendo is working with PC giant Nvidia to bring a range of Wii and GameCube games to the Nvidia Shield handheld.

The catch, however, is that the game are unlikely to ever officially appear outside of China.

Analyst Daniel Ahmad reports that the Shield will feature official ports of titles such as The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Super Mario Galaxy, New Super Mario Bros Wii and Punch-Out. Metroid Prime is also apparently incoming.

How things such as motion control have been handled in the conversion we don’t know, although New Super Mario Bros will apparently run at 1080p – and the same is understood to be true of the other titles, too.

This all comes to be thanks to an official partnership between Nvidia, Nintendo and Chinese firm iQiyi.

The Shield itself will retail for RMB 1,499 (£169) in the country, while the Nintendo titles will sell for RMB 68 (£7.67) each. All of the official communications about the deal stress that it’s specifically for the Chinese market, so don’t go expecting Nintendo to roll out official PC support elsewhere in the world.

Saying that, Nintendo does have a bit of an emulation problem, which official support would likely address. Not only are the emulators available for its entire back catalogue of machines, but even Wii U games now run pretty smoothly on high-end PC gaming rigs thanks to the popular (and, it must be said, quite complicated) CEMU emulation software.

The CEMU community has put huge resources into getting things such as the Wii U version of Breath of the Wild running well on PC, for instance.

Here is the official trailer and store page for Nvidia Shield in Chinahttps://t.co/E5GHQgkazGhttps://t.co/Sn1gwScjsp pic.twitter.com/WAn9otELoD

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 5, 2017

Here is some gameplay of Twilight Princess running on Nvidia Shield.

It is said to be running in HD (Not sure what that means exactly in terms of the port).

Wii games on Shield will cost RMB 68. pic.twitter.com/M84WfV9eWE

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 5, 2017

This is gameplay of New Super Mario Bros Wii running at 1080p on Nvidia Shield.

It is said that Metroid Prime for Wii will also come to the system in the future. pic.twitter.com/FKYFFoPB2R

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) December 5, 2017