The NVIDIA Shield TV will receive a number of high-profile ports of Wii games from Nintendo as part of its upcoming launch in China, according to recent media reports from the Far Eastern country citing officials of the two companies. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy are two Wii games that have already been confirmed as coming to NVIDIA’s set-top box and more may be on the way. The low-res video that can be seen below is said to depict Twilight Princess running on the Shield TV, with its author claiming that all games ported from the Wii will run in 1080p instead of 480p, the original Wii’s native resolution.
The partnership appears to be exclusive to China which is set to receive a heavily modified version of the Shield TV from NVIDIA. The device will be priced at 1,499 yuan, or just over $225, and will also feature NVIDIA’s streaming platform that will allow it to play various PC games. The Chinese division of the company pledged to keep expanding the game library of the Shield TV every two months, though that promise doesn’t appear to encompass Nintendo. The Japanese developer may bring more Wii or GameCube games to the set-top box seeing how the two consoles have the same architecture, whereas it could also be using the newly announced collaboration as a test of whether porting Wii and GameCube Games to the Switch is viable. The Shield TV and Switch both use NVIDIA’s Tegra X1 system-on-chip and while they differ in terms of software, they have relatively identical capabilities as far as raw processing power is concerned.
The Shield TV console started selling in China today and Nintendo’s ports are expected to be released shortly, though this experiment is unlikely to ever become available in other parts of the world, as suggested by the Japanese firm’s historic product practices. Nintendo’s Android gaming efforts have so far been exclusively focused on mobile games, with its latest release coming just several weeks back in the form of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
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