Reminder: Three New NES Games Hit Switch Today, Plus A Special Version Of Kid Icarus

"Will you be firing up your NES app today?"

No.

"Which game are you most excited to try out?"

Wave Race 64.... one day.

Still trying to get through all these Mega Drive games on the SEGA Collection!

Fantastic I do enjoy playing these nes games now and again

I haven't played any of these before, so yes I'll be "firing up" my NES app.

@RupeeClock Ya know what would better? perhaps some actual modified nes roms, like level changes, sprite changes

kinda like the Donkey Kong Original Edition! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHJVuBZ5iPA which restore the pie level and some of DK's animations

or like in the NES remixes, that allow you to play as Peach in Super Mario Bros 3 or Toad in Kirby

honestly.. I would prefer having the NES remix games back along with the Virtual Console... and a SNES remix

@RupeeClock there is only one SP that I appreciated and that's Zelda II. It starts you with your attack, magic, and life all maxed out which let you skip that endless grind.

And so Punch-Out (itself admittedly a coin discount purchase way back when) leaves my 3DS memory card. SMB Lost Levels probably won't - even though the Switch app has save states as well, I feel too wussy to start over and replay what I've already covered - which, far be it from me to deny, was covered with a generous use of save states to begin with. Sure, I'm wuss enough that Mega Man 1 through 4 ended up "beaten" in my Backloggery through save states as well, but I do believe OG SMB2 will make any Mega Man game feel like a zen session of Electroplancton in comparison. It might make Cuphead feel like this for all I know.😆

Place your bets, folks - will this game receive a "special edition" one day, too?😏

It 'a SP' not 'an SP'.

@RupeeClock I've misunderstood what SP means then as it sounds totally wrong to me.

To me it read 'you'll also find that an single player..'

So i guess thats wrong.

[Edit - of course, its read ess pee]

@BumpkinRich @RupeeClock But is it "a NES" or "an NES"

@chardir
Gesundheit!

@BumpkinRich #fail

But SNES when?

@RupeeClock It’s totally the En E Ess 😂

Im actually excited about all four games. Mainly Punch Out and Lost Levels tho. Kid Icarus is a fantastic surprise tho! Wasnt expecting that.

Though growing up with playing nes games, I don't feel much joy revisiting them anymore.

Won't necessarily complain about more games to play. However, I'm ready for other consoles.

they need to institute an online lobby for multiplayer.
and lets get some SNES and GBA games on there for chrissakes

Not bad. Looking forward to playing Punchout and perhaps a bit of Star Soldier. Combine this with a few games of Tetris Online and a few Mario Kart 8 races I might actually get my money's worth this week for Nintendo Online....
SNES games are now long overdue however, come on Nintendo rise to the challenge!!!

All sound like great additions to the NES app to me. Wonder what next month will bring us? Only things I can see them adding is Double Dragon II and Star Tropics II due to the upcoming Konami collections. I'm sure they'll dig up some 3rd party games nobody asked for in the next few months and everyone will be happy when SNES games finally come in September.

I've never played the lost levels and I couldn't beat punch out when I was a kid... It's going to be a frustrating but fun next couple of weeks. Save states feel a little bit like cheating but I'm old now so there's that hehe.

ahaha reminds me of the old NSMB meme from Punchout 😂
The game had a couple great tunes: the training music and the main fighting theme.
I remember playing Punchout at a friends house with an NES Advantage controller. At the time I thought that controller was a perfect match for the game.

I will be playing through the Lost Levels again. Probably play Punch Out for the 89th time.

Don't play them if you don't want to, you guys. Sheesh. Drop the negativity, ffs.

Completely forgot these were even coming or that the app even exists for that matter. That's how much this service has wowed me.

@BumpkinRich Actually, Mr. Bumpkin it would be 'an SP'. Especially if we are dealing with an acronym such as SP, an A in front of it would totally confuse people.

this is from apastyle.com

The general rule for indefinite articles is to use a before consonants and an before vowels. The trick here is to use your ears (how the acronym is pronounced), not your eyes (how it's spelled). HIV (pronounced "aitch eye vee") begins with a vowel sound, so an HIV patient is correct.Apr 12, 2012

How quick some people jump to correct others.....

I certainly will be playing Punch Out!

@titotito3399 I played the lost levels on an emulayor before and it was traumatizingly hard AF. Like holy crap, you'd be cursing your balls off. NoA called it good when they deemed this game too hard for NA players.

I can't wait till the SNES. I have fond nostalgia with the NES and there are some great games on NES but I feel like SNES is truly the golden age of gaming. The SNES era is truly one of the best eras for Nintendo and gaming and general . There are way more titles that still looks great and play amazing even now. A testament to game design and the hardware of the time.

I do like Star Soldier. I'm alright with the NES offerings so far. We're just now in month 7.

Maybe it doesn’t start at the exact same place as the SP version, but Kid Icarus has passwords that do different things, like take you to the end. A few of them even give things like infinite lives.

@Kirby_Girl
I hope Nintendo will launch SNES app with N64 and GBA app as well. It will take too long to get to other newer retro consoles if they go through one console app at a time. There’s no reason why they can’t add 2 games for each retro system per month.

@RupeeClock @mrchills My mistake had already been kindly pointed out and explained by @RupeeClock. As I've already said I read the words and not the initialism so it sounded wrong to me.

Of course I could have deleted my post but that way no one learns.

How quick some people are to jump on others mistakes indeed.

Whoo...more NES games...that they have given us ten quadrillion times.

Meh. I didn't buy an NES classic because I pretty meh on the NES. I do love the SNES-GC though.

But I also bought an SNES classic so I don't care what they add. Give me a 64 classic and I'm good. I bought online for Splatoon only.

Star Soldier is nice, the other two meh not so much unless you never play those before. Easy Mode Kid Icarus is nice too but I rather stick to the original. Now where's the Super NES games Nintendo?

I remember doing a code and pretty much playing Kid Icarus ending like the SP version does, that game was really hard especially as a kid. Now I'm really just not interested in any of these besides maybe replaying the ending of Kid Icarus, but that will take what a few minutes and you are done as long as you can beat Medusa. Really need some more oomph from switch online, only reason I have it is due to prime giving it to me for free. At this point they have a few months to convince me to keep it since I probably will only have the 3 months because i'm getting rid of my Prime before it renews in May, because I'm unhappy with price increases and the things they've taken away there.

@RupeeClock For the little ones I guess. Very young Kids might have a hard time with say, Zelda NES being lost within the game world with no details map telling you where to go, but if you let them just fight Gannon right away, its some sense of "Yaaaay, you beat Ganon!" which okay the kid did no work getting to that point, but at that age, they'll feel good none the less.

That and I suppose reliving the ending to your fav NES game without going through the whole thing. Much as I love Kid Icarus, don't always have the time to go through it yet again.

I will be playing these.
The special editions are garbage and they should do 4 games instead.

Those "special NES games" are nothing more than games with save states or rather, nothing more than someone getting to a certain point and then calling it a "special" version without the effort on the user's part.

I think people’s negativity about this part of NSO isn’t as bad as during the 1st 4 months that over-blew the lack of other platform-related legacy services like this or a straightforward Virtual Console where both Nindies would suffer, so would people’s wallets and scare away other Virtual Console-type banners like Arcade Archives.

Honestly; Virtual Console was great because the concept was unorthodox and new. Why a Virtual Console will NEVER happen is the fact alone that other companies realized they can successfully sell their retro games THEIR way, through both individual banners and collections like Arcade Archives, Johnny Turbo’s Arcade, stuff like SNK 40th Anniversary Collection, SEGA Genesis Collection, and Atari Flashback Collection. Oh, and did I forget Nintendo let a third-party group of programers go to their Redmond, Washington NOA HQ to flash a ROM image of the world’s only working Sky Skipper arcade cabinet and release it alongside Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, Punch-Out!!, etc. under Arcade Archives?

To those tired of NES games and say “just discontinue this nonsense and get straight to 90’s and 00’s consoles, NES games are already on other things”: You forget about Wii, Wii U, and the NES Classic Edition being already being discontinued with the former’s online services just being shuttered, Their only being 13M Wii U consoles compared to 101M Wii systems, and 8M or so NES Classics. The 3DS with 72.5M is in a odd spot considering people want it discontinued, it too having NES game, so saying that is pointless. I’m not holding my breath for SNES and heck, think it and GCN are overrated. (no, not overused, OVERRATED)

How about a Gamecube app Nintendo? I mean these NES games up to N64 are already available on Wii U virtual console.

Punch Out can be a pretty useful game for testing out input lag on a 4K or HD television, plus it's only one of the greatest games of all time. Definitely looking forward to that, since I'm curious if Game Mode on my Samsung 4K actually removes all the input lag. Of course I know that being an emulation it will have some input lag by default but still. Cool game for testing stuff like that out until I can snag myself a RetroUSB AVS or get my NES modded.

EDIT: Oh and while I haven't tried out Mario 2 yet, if it's the actual FDS version, then that'd be pretty rad. That would make it the only game on the service to be from the FDS. Plus it's a mighty fine game if not a tad spiteful towards the player at times.

I updated today and received these games!

I'll fire up punch out tonight to see if I can make it to Mr dream. Had a hard time with the nes classic version for some reason but I can crush it in Mike Tysons punch out.

@ClassSonicSatAm Yes, yes, yes.

I loved playing the arcade version of punch out, but it is also good to play this nes version too.

They're going to have to do way better with this app. $25 a year for an emulator that suffers from horrible flickering and artifacting. Ya naw. This is the quality you'd expect from a free emulator not a paid one from the official source. Lol

Or you could try and convince yourself that the 25 is going towards opening up some ports and allowing people to connect via peer to peer. Because that's totally worth it. Right?

Smash bros is selling super well....meanwhile in reality, it's the laggiest most unplayable game. A simple 1v1 is a slideshow. Terrible network performance is unforgivable considering the simplistic nature of smash.

If these companies want billions of dollars annually to let us play games we already paid for, they should at the very least, be expected to provide a dedicated server system.

I'll pay for online if I'm guaranteed a < 30 ms dedicated server with region locking and ping filtering for every single online title. Until then I won't pay for it. I'll simply go back to other platforms.

@Itzdmo

Can't really comment on the quality of the online myself but your comment about the emulator is wrong on so many levels. The NES Online emulation is actually EXTREMELY accurate. Nintendo has had years to perfect their emulation practices and rather than run each ROM on a single emulator like the kind you're talking about, each ROM runs on an emulator designed for that particular game. Any "flickering" or "artifacting" you're experiencing is coming from the actual game, as NES games are notorious for flickering, slowdown, and sometimes a bit of garbage displayed on the border where the screen ends. Mario 3 in particular is bad about this in World 6's fortress, but that sort of thing quite literally existed on the original hardware. Their emulation for Switch Online is perfect, right down to the imperfections. The reason you don't notice some of this on other emulators is because many of them have flickering turned off by default and some emulators may not display some of the border garbage from Mario 3.

That's not to say the actual service itself is perfect. While the service launched with a varied library of games, they don't exactly showcase the NES' greatest hits. Games like Kirby were completely missing at launch and some of their choices so far have been a bit dubious. No Contra games? Really? Double Dragon but not Double Dragon II? Where's Castlevania? The border on the screen can be a little obnoxious, there's not many screen settings, and you can't even customize the controls which is annoying for some because they use A and B rather than B and Y like many are used to.

As far as emulation goes though, NES Online is basically perfect. Maybe a bit TOO perfect.

@panthro I enjoyed playing that again on WiiU, though having it on Switch would be fun, esp if they decided to improve their emulator to run N64 games at higher resolution finally

Pleased to see them give us a Western box art of Super Mario Bros The Lost Levels instead of the exact Japanese box art.

There are still some important NES (excluding some big third party ones) games to be included. Rad Racer, Tetris, Donkey Kong Jr, RC pro am, etc.... Hopefully they should run out of games to release in. A few months....
What are your bet for next batch?
Edit: i know RC pro am and rad racer are third party, but I don't think square or rare would have any problem licencing them at this point

I'm excited to try to finally beat Punch-Out. Also Lost Levels is my favorite 2D Mario so this is actually super appealing to me.

@BoFiS I've never actually played it! Always wanted to, had an N64, never got it!

@ClassSonicSatAm Monthly nes remix levels, start out by dividing up content from the original game, then release other more ad more everything - toss in leader boards or a smaller scoped battle royale version where a ton of people arent playing a success of levels at once - couldn't be that hard

Well now. After finally beating Mr. Sandman on Arcade Archives Punch-Out!!, I'm ready for more. I've never faced Mr. Dream, so this will make it all the more fun. Wonder if he fights like Mike Tyson? Glad Kid Icarus got an SP... I didn't feel like doing through the whole game again just to fight Medusa and play that awesome shooter level. Always a sucker for dabbling in shmups, so I'll play some Star Soldier. Lastly, I technically had my fill of Lost Levels, from the beautified Super Mario All-Stars introduction, to the authentic original on past virtual consoles, but I will give it a quick play for old times sake.

@Onion

The emulation itself is likely to have lag. You'd need an FPGA to test the lag of your TV. I've beaten punchout on an AVS on a number of TVs that it was impossible to do so with the Wii U/Nes classic versions because the emulation had too much lag. I've not yet played the switch version, but I'll be surprised if either docked or portable if Tyson is beatable.

@NintendoByNature

Punchout is unbeatable on the nes classic because of emulation lag. It's likely it will also be unbeatable on the switch for the same reason.

@RupeeClock I don't either. Its the dumbest thing and personally I think its rather insulting.

If I wanna go through Kid Icarus with all the treasures, then I'll beat the game once and start again.

@RupeeClock The AVGN saw it coming
But yeah, they could have instead went the extra mile to give you hacked save states instead.
Metroid with all the gear from the start, Shmups with "freeplay" etc.
I really don't see the point of bloating the already messy app interface with "Special" versions which are simply savestates that could have been implemented in the actual versions (Extra page on the save state menu, one for the regular writable slots, one specifically for read only "special" states)

@RupeeClock I was 5 years old when I did most of my NES playing because when I was 6 I got an SNES, and my 5 year old self would have loved the SP versions because there was no way i was going to see the final boss/last tage/ ending otherwise lol. Most of those games are impossible to beat for most little kids.

@cleveland124

I actually got pretty far in this version of Punch Out but I did notice very slight input lag, particularly while fighting Bald Bull. Just more incentive to get an AVS or RGB mod my NES, I guess! Plus I own the Mike Tyson version and not this lame "Mr. Dream" crap. I'll let you know if I manage to beat the game in docked mode. I haven't tested handheld out yet, but I'll be sure to do so. Most of the lag seems to occur when trying to dodge, I found myself just a tad late when trying to dodge. It didn't become an issue until I reached Bald Bull, but I definitely felt it.

For the record and for anyone else curious, I do NOT feel any lag with any other NES Online game, so the input lag caused by emulation is very minor. It just happens that Punch Out requires twitch reflexes and that extra frame or two lost due to emulation actually matters here. Not to mention any additional input delay coming from the TV. Luckily, my TV seems to have very little input lag by itself as long as it's in Game Mode, but I won't know to what extent until I test out a real Punch Out cartridge.

@NintendoFan4Lyf

I wouldn't mind hearing the results of that myself, as I haven't tested tabletop mode or that particular controller.

@NintendoFan4Lyf @Onion

I usually beat Tyson on the first try. Last night, I spent 3 hours and I did beat Tyson in handheld mode. There was definitely lag that made the game much harder. And I don't know how much my beating him was anticipation rather than reaction.

For instance, at the beginning of round 2, I block his gut punch and punch him in the gut. On an NES and CRT this is easy. But to do it on this version I had to punch as soon as I saw his punch coming at me. That's the only way I could land a gut punch.

Overall, probably the best emulated version of Tyson I've seen because I haven't beaten any other emulation. But almost impossibly hard due to lag. And bad controls too. It took me forever to learn how to uppercut him because of the bad button placement. I use a dpad joycon so that wasn't an issue. The small buttons were an issue though as it was hard for me to get little mac up because the buttons were so small and close it was hard to rapidly hit. That said I will probably never touch this game again. It's just not as fun as playing on a crt or an fpga like an AVS. And I won't be trying docked mode. Bluetooth controller lag will like make this almost impossible game impossible.

@cleveland124

Yeah I just did handheld mode a few minutes ago and there's still some noticeable lag for me as well, but it seems less than docked mode. I was able to counter Bald Bull's infamous bull rush attack, which I found was basically impossible to pull off on my TV. My TV even in game mode is probably adding that one extra frame that's making the fight harder. When I played the game a few years ago on my CRT, I got past Bald Bull on my first try. I decided to go back and try my original copy on my CRT and sure enough, I beat him on the first go once again. Tyson is a tad above my skill level regardless of which version I play as I could only beat him once or twice in my whole life, definitely not something I can reliably do on an everyday basis.

Still a fantastic emulation of the original game though, right down to some of the little graphical flaws. Hopefully this can help introduce future generations to Punch Out. Who knows, maybe Nintendo will see fit to give us a Punch Out sequel on Switch?

The only SP version of the games worth playing is The Legend of Zelda. The thing that sucks about all the others is that, yeah, you have some upgrades, but it starts you on the last level... it’s not a whole new experience, it’s just the last level with some upgrades.

Just beat Mr. Dream. My muscle memory from childhood is pretty spot on.