Nintendo are still making masterpieces unlike Sega.
You're right, but I'm surprised you didn't remember the downright *bad* spin-offs made during the WiiU era :v (somewhere, people are still mad about amiibo festival), oh yeah and skyward sword lmao.
As for the SM3DAS collection, I've only played SM64 on the Wii Virtual Console and the two Galaxy games, and I may get sunshine later since my Wii is compatible with Gamecube stuff.
While there was effort put into this, this was still a bit of a cash grab.
Granted, from the looks of things, this collection isn't bad. In fact, everything's emulated with stunning accuracy, and some games like Galaxy hold up shockingly well in HD.
64 looks about the same, and the upscaled textures look nice, except for the HUD which looks like a terrible xBRZ filter was placed over it.
I can't judge Sunshine since I haven't played it before, but from what I've heard, it's apparently a bit more buggy and jank than the original. Can't 100% confirm that tho. (Also the analog FLUDD controls are gone, while I can imagine that isn't their fault, they could've at *least* given the game support with GameCube controllers which they don't do for some reason @_@)
Galaxy has the biggest improvements. The bad "shake-to-spin" ordeal, while not a deal breaker, has been fixed with a button mapping, which is great. The UI was updated to match the switch controls, and the controls and text were updated to handle both handheld and TV modes which is also great. What's kinda weird tho is the touch controls for handheld mode, while I can probably assume that they thought this was the best way to do it, Galaxy is a game where the pointer has to be onscreen at all times since star bits are often hidden out of bounds where Mario can't reach em, but the pointer can, and abruptly stopping to touch a screen just rubs me the wrong way @_@
However, while this collection is good, there could've been a lot more, and the limited exclusivity deal is clearly there to make fast cash for Nintendo; You'd have to be blind to *not* be able to see that.
Sonic Jam wasn't just the original trilogy, it also came with Sonic World and a slew of bonus material, as other people said.
But there's also the Kirby 20th anniversary collection, which didn't just have 6 emulated games, but an entire interactive history of the series with videos and 3D box arts, a small bonus campaign featuring nothing but newly designed challenge stages in the style of Kirby's RtD, three whole episodes from Right Back at Ya, a soundtrack CD featuring some good music from the entire franchise, and a small booklet featuring a small history lesson complete with concept art and whatnot. It was a complete package filled with love and respect for the franchise.
This is the 35th anniversary of the plumber that saved the NA Video Game Industry, become popular in Europe, and caused Japan to recognize games as an art form; More should've been done, and it's overpriced compared to the alternative.
Some other things to note:
There's plenty of things that could be said one way or the other about Valve, but I always kind of appreciated their motto of: "If you want to stop piracy, offer a better service than the pirates."
This is becoming steadily more true as big AAA companies like Nintendo or Sony can't even hold a candle to the amount of features that RetroArch has when it comes to emulation.
Say it with me kids: Emulation is not a bad word. Emulators also take effort to develop, even if you work for Nintendo and have all the system documentation. Emulators don't just magically come into existence you know, and they don't just download emulators from the Internet and sell them to you either.
I almost agree with everything you said except for one thing.
Nintendo has the source code and source architecture for every game and console that they have made or owned, most dev teams behind unofficial emulators do *not*, and have to figure out the architecture by themselves via reverse engineering. This disagree turns into a half-agree when Nintendo's European R&D still had to do some crazy things to get stuff working again and with total accuracy to the originals, while I can't disagree that the whole thing was effortless, that one fact still sticks out in my mind like a sore thumb.
The BLJ glitch in SM64 has been patched, that means SM64 is the Shindou Edition of SM64 in SM3DAS.
No BLJ? No problem! SM64 can still be broken horribly as this GDQ TAS run demonstrates :v