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I've felt sort of bad about how the download assignments were shaking down over the past few weeks. I got to enjoy myself with Dr. Mario and Toki Tori while Sardius slaved in the fiendish hells of Protöthea and Critter Round-Up. Virtual Console had gotten so bad he was enjoying Sky Kid. Something had to be done.

This week would be different! This week he could enjoy Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa and My Pokemon Ranch, and I would play whatever he didn't want... oh, hey, it's Dig Dug? I like Dig Dug! I guess this won't be so bad after all.

... wait, it's six dollars?

Six dollars to play NES Dig Dug, when I could go on Xbox Live and buy a better port with leaderboards and 720p support for five dollars?

Ladies, gentlemen: the Virtual Console has reached a new milestone in failure.

(It hasn't failed as hard as the mobile version of Dig Dug, which retails for a ridiculous $14.99, but this week's NES Dig Dug port is still a six-dollar bomb of sadness.)

Dig Dug is one of the most popular arcade games of all time, and almost as utterly ubiquitous as Pac-Man or Space Invaders. I am convinced children of gamers are now born with genetic memories of playing Dig Dug, absorbed purely through Dig Dug's impact on the collective unconscious. Nobody needs to buy Dig Dug any more; it's seeped into the gaming atmosphere, like Pong or Asteroids.

I played Dig Dug like a madman on an Atari 7800. The graphics weren't as nice as the NES port's by any means, but the game felt basically the same. Arguably, better-- on the 7800 I had a pretty nice clicky joystick that was comfortable for hours on end, while the NES Dig Dug sometimes interprets D-pad input weirdly.

Perhaps this is why Namco didn't crap this port out onto the American market during the NES's heyday. When the system shipped with an paradigm-shattering gem like Super Mario Bros, asking folks to drop $50 or $60 on yet another Dig Dug port that didn't play any better than the cheaper Atari cart probably seemed like, well, a terrible idea.

Ah, but we have the Virtual Console now, which means nothing stands between us and Nintendo of America's gleeful pursuit of bad, vaguely insulting ideas. It would be one thing if this was a game that never had more than a cult following in the US, like Battle City. Six dollars for that feels fair; chances are you're getting a whole new game. On that principle alone, I would pay far upwards of six dollars for a newly-localized vintage NES Namco RPG, like the original Megami Tensei.

But six bucks for a lightweight NES port of Dig Dug, when I could probably buy a copy of the GameCube Namco Museum and get 14 high-quality arcade ports of Namco games including Dig Dug for roughly the same price? Hell, I could buy one of the GBA Namco Museums for the same price and get a nice portable Dig Dug.

Whoever picked this ROM file to dump onto the Virtual Console's servers hasn't bothered to think anything about the release through, to a degree that is almost as staggeringly awful as the unplayable Operation Wolf ROM that showed up last year. No, somebody saw Dig Dug and was all "hey, people like Dig Dug! We can get away with calling it an import? Awesome, jack up the price a little!" Then he or she went to lunch while ROMs for Bionic Commando and Earthbound sat neglected in a closet, quietly gathering dust.

The Virtual Console could be the most amazing thing to happen to retrogaming since e-bay suddenly make everyone's collection available to everyone else. It could be a way of finally creating a canon of classic games, and making that library of gaming's evolution available at a reasonable price point. It could even introduce American gamers to great retro titles from Japan and Europe that never had a chance to make an impact over here.

Instead, Nintendo wants to use the Virtual Console to see if they can trick you into paying six dollars for an old port of Dig Dug. Here, have a video of someone playing NES Dig Dug. It's going to be exactly what you expect it to be.

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