Nintendo Switch Online torments us again with dull SNES and NES games

Good news – Nintendo Switch Online is getting new (old) SNES and NES games that you can play on your Nintendo Switch as part of Nintendo’s subscription service! Bad news – they’re all a bit rubbish.

Drumroll for the new additions please… May we welcome SNES titles Caveman Ninja (AKA Joe & Mac), Super Baseball Simulator 1.000, Magical Drop2 and Spanky’s Quest, as well as the NES title Ninja JaJaMaru-Kun.

As Twitter user @mariesleepy succinctly put it in response to Nintendo’s tweeted announcement, “they literally cannot put a game a single soul cares about on this.”

I suppose Caveman Ninja is alright, a port of an arcade platformer with a humorous prehistoric vibe. But we’d hardly call it a classic. Spanky’s Quest has a good name too, we guess.

But where’s Earthbound? Where’s Super Mario RPG? Chrono Trigger? A Super Star Wars game even?

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Super stingy

After getting off to a strong start, Nintendo Switch Online is now getting the off cuts of the SNES and NES catalogues. The service is already the weakest of the console game subscription services, and Nintendo really needs to up its game in this department.

It’s high time that Nintendo added another console to its Switch Online platform. How about the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, or Game Boy Color? There’s some greats tucked in there, perfectly proven for on-the-go handheld play. Or, whisper it, even the Nintendo 64?

These are classic systems that Nintendo has variously offered in the past through digital download services, so what’s keeping them off the Switch? If Nintendo expects its players to keep dipping into their pockets for its subscription service, it's going to have to dig out the classics.

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