If you've booted up the Nintendo Switch Online's fancy new SNES app, you may well have already given Yoshi's Island a fresh spin. The 1995 classic is now available at no extra cost to Switch Online subscribers - and we'd definitely recommend diving into it.
Now, we wouldn't blame you for missing it, but it turns out that the version running on Switch has fixed a glitch that was found in the same game on the SNES Classic console. You see, in the original SNES title, if the player touches a Fuzzy (the floaty white things), a strange, pixelated effect is shown on screen as you enter a disoriented state. Weirdly, on the SNES Classic, this effect didn't appear to work correctly, with the game just sort of flashing for a moment instead.
We initially imagined that the SNES games on Switch would be the same emulations found on the SNES Classic, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Yoshi's Island on Switch performs just like the original with the effect perfectly intact. You can see it all in action in this video from the folks at GameXplain.
You learn something every day, we guess!
Have you been enjoying the SNES lineup on Switch? Which games have you been playing? Tell us below.
[source youtube.com]
Comments 56
Class game. But do I keep my original snes copy or sell it...
I'll have to download the SNES app, this was one of my favourite games from back in the day!
@Sakura7 Keep your originals, always keep your originals. You never know what it'll be worth some day as long as you keep them in good working order!!!
Touch Fuzzy, get (graphically accurate) dizzy.
@DarthFoxMcCloud got a few of these games but there's reports that people are starting to see the cartridge roms starting to stop functioning after a couple decades so one wonders if many of us will have blank cartridges in a few years if true
Good to know. This one was my first game on the SNES, it has a special place in my gamer heart.
Now, what I don't get is why is fixing a broken emulation is "random"
It isn't more random, it was an error on SNES classic but no way to patch it. Simple.
@Sakura7 Fake news!
NERD has proved once again to be emulation geniuses
I wouldn't necessarily say it was a glitch, so much as the SNES Classic's SNES emulator was not accurate enough to play the game accurately.
@mikegamer NERD developed the emulator for the SNES Classic as well.
@Sakura7 The battery in the cartridge may run down as it hasn't been plugged in for a while and lose your save.
But the whole cartridge wiping itself?? I don't think so.
This was the first thing I thought of as soon as I saw that Yoshi's Island was on the list of SNES games.
It's nice to see the actual effect rather than the jarring one that the SNES mini has.
Also, Nintendolife looks good in green!
Yes, I haven't gotten this far yet, but I've been wondering if I'd get dizzy with the same visuals when I touch fuzzy as I did back when I played it on SNES. I like the Gameboy Advance version, but it definitely doesn't update the groundswell at the same animation rate as the SNES. Awesome to see that Switch has it all at 60fps with full psychedelia intact.
To put out Yoshi's Island for the first time since the SNES with one of its most memorable levels messed up is almost criminal. In fact the person responsible for the SNES Mini version should be charged with crimes against gaming and sentenced to be pelted with green and white eggs while navigating an assault course after consuming magic mushrooms.
But this ain't a fix. As the person says on original background was still there and now it's missing. I can't call it a fix if something is suddenly not there. Switch is the one that needs to be patched. Period
Did anyone else notice that the snes games on switch don't look as colorful as the snes mini?
@jobvd
I was wondering if the colors were off. I also think the volume isn't as loud as the NES app games.
Did they fix that horrible crying baby sound?!
@holygeez03
Don't get hit?
Hm thats good fix.. for us
@Sakura7
Never once have I heard of a cartridge "failing". They may get dirty connectors which may make them stop working until they are clean, but that's it.
FAKE NEWS
I actually discovered a way to soft-lock the game last night. Turns out you can do it by hitting a message block with two eggs in succession.
I don't think this was a glitch, and if you hacked the Classic I think you were able to even fix it a little.
@UnseatingKDawg Nice job on soft-locking your game just nice lol
Fuzzy noises intensify
@DarthFoxMcCloud Yep, and with digital services, the "owner" (not you) can pull the plug anytime they feel like it. Books, movies, TV series on Netflix.... They can be (and often are) here today, gone tomorrow.
@Sakura7 Do you have any links? Older cartridges are "mask ROM" and seem to be WAY more durable than newer cartridges which use flash memory
Is it just me or was the wii u vc super Mario kart a lot better? It feels quite laggy and I haven't noticed it with my other switch games
This was probably a problem of the emulator, not the ROM.
And the emulator wouldn't be the same.
These games aren't ports, they are dumped ROMs and it is highly likely the Switch and SNES Mini actually have identical copies of the same ROM.
It's the emulators on each that would differ and the seems like the one on the Switch is more accurate to represent the game properly.
@Alucard83
The Switch runs it perfectly. The SNES Classic is the one with the issue.
Now if someone could just patch this into the SNES Mini version. . . .
I prefer the yoshi noises in the gba version of the game, and the extra levels. gba online when
I noticed that Star Fox runs at the proper frame rate on the Switch. the SNES Mini version runs a tad bit faster. You can tell when they first launch out of Corneria.
@60frames-please I suspect the GBA can't use the mosaic effects along with tile offsets and, I also want to say, some kind of scanline rendering. I'm not 100% sure how the SNES does it, GBA version is very weak in terms of graphical fidelity.
@Mijzelffan
The GBA version though has not as good graphics or sound though I gotta say.
That's odd, I haven't ever encountered or heard of that glitch on my GBA or SNES Mini.
@Sakura7 : Keep it. Unlike your SNES cartridge, you don't own the Switch version of Yoshi's Island.
Touch fuzzy, get dizzy
@mikegamer Yeah, it's nice to have the full fuzzy effect back. I've been playing it as a GBA virtual console title on Wii U. I adore Yoshi's Island!
Why does “Yoshi” have his own category on nintendolife.com?!?!
@mikegamer Actually, the SNES doesn’t do it at all. Yoshi’s Island runs atop the Super FX 2 CPU built into the cart, which does all the dirty work. That CPU responsible for the dizzy effect and the occasional 3D graphic. Moreover, the entire game is based against that chip; the SNES itself in this case does little more than relay controller inputs to the FX and relay the FX’s images to the screen.
The GBA version does not have the FX chip, and so is forced to rely on what the base GBA hardware can provide. The GBA is in some ways more powerful than the base SNES but less powerful than the FX, thus some graphical effects like the dizzy effect become cheapened.
Doubtless the Super FX 1 & 2 chips are difficult to emulate especially given their odd tandem relationship with the base SNES. This is probably why Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island (SNES) never appeared on the Wii/WiiU/3DS virtual consoles. The SNES mini was probably their first stab at emulating these chips, which would explain odd glitches like the non-functional dizzy effect and Star Fox’s slightly hastened frame rate. By the time of the Switch, they’ve improved the emulation to a quality closer to the venerable NES and base SNES emulators they have been reusing since the Wii days
Don't have a SNES Mini, and so have never seen that issue before.
That seems rather....sloppy honestly.
@UnseatingKDawg
That worked in the original game too.
Try throwing a fat egg at a message block in a stage like Lakitu's wall.
Has anyone done a review on the service. Interested in knowing the quality of the emulation.
@Sakura7 keep it, without a doubt.
@DarthFoxMcCloud got a bunch of n64 games a while ago and now most of them can be sold for $20+ a piece. Safe the games, their worth can only increase
Oh yeah, I did think touching the fuzzies 'felt' somehow different when I played the game on the Classic.
Didn't even manage to figure out that the pixel-scaling effect was missing. Glad to see it back in full function then, I suppose. The developers were having a riot with those hardware tricks in Yoshi's Island, so I'd excuse an emulator for not being able to pull every single one of them.
@Pod exactly. Given that Yoshi’s Island has a whole extra CPU that regular SNES games don’t have, and which has a weird tandem relationship with the base SNES hardware, the emulation for Yoshi’s Island (and Star Fox) has to be difficult to pull off.
the gba version is the best ! the extra levels, one of the best games of all time.
Left 2 or 3 special leves to finish 100% on 3ds virtual console !
@XAHydra it was in a recent edition of Edge magazine, though they specifically mentioned MegaDrive/Genesis cartridges. I think it was issue 334 'This Month in Edge' section.
@RedZone908 Which is funny, because the Wii and Wii U had unofficially emulated the GSU/GSU-2 chips on homebrew at full speed. They had a few quirks, but indeed ran full speed via homebrew. Wii U at least could have run SuperFX-2 just fine, but for whatever reason, Nintendo opted not to release them on the eShop.
@mikegamer Fair point! My guess is that, corporately speaking, Nintendo decided during the Virtual Console era that it wasn’t worth allocating time and money to code the Super FX 1 emulator for the grand total of 4 games that required it, and the Super FX 2 for only 3. But for the SNES mini, which was supposed to be the definitive collection of the SNES’s best hits,
it would have been hard to justify excluding Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island, thus they had to finally give in and code the FX emulators. Knowing that they wanted to grab the market via the previously-unreleased Star Fox 2 probably further incentivized the emulators’ development. By the time of the Switch, they already had the mini’s FX emulators on-hand, and had only to expend a little effort porting them to the Switch, during which time they probably spotted the previous errors.
@RedZone908 Too bad the Wii U only got the inferior Yoshi's Island for GBA
@mikegamer yep. The only bad thing about the SNES one is the six extra GBA-exclusive levels it doesn’t have. Apart from that, SNES is superior in every way
@RedZone908 Indeed it is
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