This month’s Nintendo Switch Online update brings two more NES classics to subscribers but, more importantly, a rewind feature to let perfectionists undo their minutest of errors without restarting the whole game.
On July 17 (one week from today), Rewind will become available to all games in the Nintendo Switch Online collection. Hold ZL and ZR to trigger it and move back to a point before the goof-up, then play from there.
The two games coming are from the pre-Super Mario Bros. portion of Mario and Luigi’s canon, where they would take different jobs and had a subcontractor named Stanley working extermination. He shows up in Donkey Kong 3, where the big ape breaks into a greenhouse and Stanley gets rid of him by spraying bug spray on his jewels. Look, it was 1984, a lot of video game conflict was handled allegorically back then.
The other game is Wrecking Crew, in which Mario and Luigi aren’t plumbers, they’re working a teardown job. Neither brother can jump, which limits the order in which they can bust up walls, ladders, and other stuff. They’re also on the run from Spike, not the Koopa enemy from Super Mario Bros. 3, but their boss, who more or less is there to make the player hurry up. When it released for Famicom in 1985, Wrecking Crew had a level editor that used (are you sitting down) an audio cassette drive for storage. For more about audio cassettes, see Wikipedia.
There are more than 40 NES games available on-demand to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. A subscription costs $3.99 for one month, $7.99 for three months, and $19.99 for a full year. If you’re a Twitch Prime (read: Amazon Prime) subscriber, it offered a free year of Nintendo Switch Online to new and existing subscribers back in March. That can still be redeemed.
But with 40 NES games on the service, the question is now turning to what Nintendo has left to offer. As one Twitter-er noted, there isn’t much.
Nintendo-owned #NES games released on the #Wii and/or #WiiU that haven't yet arrived on the #NintendoSwitch:
— Cheesemeister (@Cheesemeister3k) July 10, 2019
Donkey Kong Jr. Math
Duck Hunt
EarthBound Beginnings
Golf
Hogan's Alley
NES Play Action Football
Urban Champion
Wild Gunman
Yoshi's Cookie
Zoda's Revenge: StarTropics II
Not every game in the library is owned by Nintendo (Double Dragon being the most notable), but most are. Obviously, first-party games are easier to toss up unilaterally. If that’s still Nintendo’s go-to move, they’re running out of options, particularly if three of those are Zapper games, and no one wants to play Donkey Kong Jr. Math. If only Nintendo had another large library of games on a platform succeeding the NES ...
