Nintendo Reminds Us The Switch Online Service Now Has Over 100 Classic Games

I'd pay big bucks to have all of that on cartridge.

Just sayin'.

Quantity over quality. And even the quantity is arguable.

More recent and advanced systems are sorely needed here.

My opinion is tough to voice, but it is part of a paid subscription service. Having used Nintendo products for years, it did suck to go from having free online to whatever this is. It still just feels so lacking overall as a service. Maybe because I don’t have full interest in a lot of the titles on offer, but I wish we had other console games to play besides just these two. There’s such a history of Nintendo content, i would like to explore more than NES and SNES for the rest of the Switch’s lifespan. Maybe some N64 and GC, or Wii. I still hope we get the Metroid Prime Trilogy in some capacity too.

@Bolt_Strike : Definitely. I've never been nostalgic about NES games and slightly less so about SNES games.

I have resisted NSO up until now (apart from the odd free trial), but a WarioWare battle royale game and/or a Game Boy selection would probably be enough for me to sign up, though I would overwhelmingly prefer physical compilations.

Quantity over quality is the case here. A lot of these games I have tried and they're just awful, even by the standards of the day.
There are some good ones in there, but they are the exception, not the rule.
Time to move on to the Game Boy/Color/Advance line.

@jcboyer515 : No publisher in their right mind would price such a release in that fashion. SEGA issued a compilation on Switch with some 50+ games at a budget price. I wouldn't expect Nintendo to be quite so generous, but I'd be perfectly happy with a few US$60/AU$80 compilations with around 30 games each (more would be preferable, of course, especially considering how small games from that era are).

I'd say the quality of games is 50/50. I'd be cool with Nintendo fixing the flicker and poor frame rate of some of the titles. But 20 bucks a year is still a pretty sweet deal for most of these games.

@jcboyer515 Nah, it would only take up 1 line. Just JALECO in big neon letters.

Obligatory "The Wii had N64 games aplenty this late in the console's life." "The Wii U had GBA and DS."

Was it really too much to Adobe® PhotoShop® the Magical Drop SFC boxart with the localized logo and be done with it?

That's nice, come get me when GB/GBA, N64, GCN, and DS games are on here.

I didn't renew my subscription back over a year ago since I didn't feel like paying Nintendo a monthly fee to play video games. Ownership means something to me.

I get why N64 and GameCube are unlikely to come for a very long time (having an app of 20 something GameCube Games in particular would eat tons of SD card space for most people), but where are the Game Boy games?

@AlienX or even just keep the SFC boxart as is, like the other Japanese boxes. Clearly the foreign language isn't a concern for Puyo Puyo and such.

@Joeynator3000 DS might be difficult to implement because the Switch is single screen (Switch 2 really needs to bring back dual screens), but the others are exactly the systems I'm waiting for.

cool retro game subscription, wish it meant their online quality was any better

@Orpheus79V @Joeynator3000 @AlienX @Shadowthrone

Fall 2018 - NSO starts with NES games
Fall 2019 - SNES games added
Fall 2020 - ???

A new console should have been added last fall, but the Mario celebration stole the spotlight.

Right now I am enjoying Mario Picross on the SNES app.

Honestly, I've been pretty happy with the online subscription service. There's a lot of fun games on it. I enjoyed Rygar, Journey to Silius for the NES and Wild Guns on the SNES. The problem is it's becoming a dumping ground for bad third party publishers like Jaleco and Data East. Capcom, Square and Konami know they can bundle their games into collections and make more money that way, so many of their bigger titles will never come to the service. The Nintendo Arcade classics like Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros. I got the far superior arcade ports from Arcade Archives. I don't clamor to play far outdated NES baseball or tennis. I do LOVE Tetris 99, though. It could be quite a bit better service and I'd gladly pay more to make it so.

I think that the NES and SNES each had over 1700 games across all regions, so you're almost there, Nintendo!

Still missing the N64 and GC libraries though

....and 37 games that are actually any good!

Crikey. Imagine making that many games in just a couple of years.
You'd be insane to even attempt such a thing.

Datamines suggest that Nintendo intends to have around 250 NES/SNES games on NSO when all said and done, so they have some ways to go.

@Bolt_Strike They could handle the dual screens in a portrait mode/tate orientation I suppose. It would mean handheld only but most DS games would have trouble working in docked. Just need an official Nintendo made grip really, not that the third party one don't work, but obviously they'd do their own in that circumstance.

Four years and over 100 games. Wow, big whoop lol.

50 classics, 50 average. It's a good selection anyway and to finish all the actual classics would take hundreds and hundreds of hours. I'm resigned to the fact this library will be limited due to the simple fact Nintendo doesn't own the approx 3000 games released across both systems. Nowadays, Konami release their own, Capcom release their own, that's life. I do wonder if N64 games would ever be part of it, while GC will be remakes for individual sale, as happens now. N64 likely would be that way too, especially since the straight conversions of 240p games would look horrendous on modern TVs.

I’ve played all those recycled classics on the Wii, WiiU and 3DS too many times to count. I like obscure games but yuck and the fact that we only have NES /SNES is just sad. I will call it monkey vomit again. It’s predictable that even if we do get the gameboy and GameBoy Advanced games it would be a slow slow drip. I don’t even use the online service.I got it for this vomit 🤢 fill collection that was way better on previous consoles. I’m not renewing my subscription. I’ve had it since it began and I play like one game. I would pay more but I am not falling for this again. I even bought a handheld emulator but nothing beats playing nintendo games on a Nintendo console. So big deal we have 100 game library filled with chunks of vomit.

Like Super Mario Sunshine, most GameCube games will need personalized controller work arounds for the analog triggers. A GC app on NSO is highly unlikely.

An excellent service! Haters gonna hate.

What's sad is that I'm perfectly fine with the virtual console existing as a paid subscription service. I mean, after buying the same dusty NES and SNES games for $5 - $10 a pop multiple times on older Nintendo consoles, providing me with a bunch of games to stream seemed to me like a stellar idea.

...and yet, they took what was might have (in theory) been a pretty solid concept and instead of that, delivered a streaming service that is so lazy and half-assed in its implementation that it beggars belief that it's anything other than intentionally bad.

As in, I must assume that Nintendo knows it's a bad service but it doesn't bother them because it's bad BY DESIGN. One almost gets the sense that they're passive aggressively punishing their fans and customers for not buying the Mini Systems. Or maybe it's that they just fundamentally resent the idea of not being able to sell you the same game for the 4th time in a row.

Or maybe they just don't feel like their fans or customers deserve to have an amazing selection of the sort of games that will actually excite a lot of people. Perhaps they value their catalogue too much to just distribute it like that. It's like they're locking most of their content behind paywalls, except without actually providing a paywall to scale.

Like, "Hey, while we here at Nintendo pride ourselves on having - by far - the cheapest, most affordable online service available, we also firmly believe that customers like you should only get what you pay for, and not a penny more. Unfortunately, at this time, we can only offer one subscription tier, so...even if you would want to pay more for a better selection, you have no other option. PLEASE UNDERSTAND."

Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed some of the games on NSO. In fact, I've had a lot of fun playing multiplayer NES/NES games online with my long distance friend (which is something we do at least a couple times a month), but...that doesn't excuse the lack of products.

I mean, this was year one of NSO, it might be understandable but this is, what, 4 YEARS into it and there's STILL almost nothing worthwhile to show for it? 100+ games across two play platforms and yet I can count the number of those games that I would consider to be of any value on two hands (and that's if I'm being generous).

No streamable N64 games. No virtual console service for GC or Wii games. Nothing. How can they possibly sit on such a treasure trove of classic games and not share them with your customers? It only makes sense if I actually assume that they have little to no respect for their fan base.

Not bad for $20. I think I would rather pay $40 a year and have games from GameCube and even some indies sponsored by Nintendo like Apple Does with Arcade...

@westman98 Wow, that's depressing.

Well at least we got the Donkey Kong Country trilogy on there so that's worth it for me. Now all I need on there is Super Mario RPG: Legends of the Seven Stars and a lot of the old Squaresoft and Enix RPGs.

And yet there's still no option in the NES Online app itself to swap button mapping instead of having to change universal mappings every time

@Ghost_of_Hasashi, Square Enix is likely to rerelease those RPGs themselves. Like how Capcom refused any Mega Man games on NSO in favor of the Legacy Collections, Konami with Castlevania, Bandai Namco with stuff like NES PAC-MAN even.

@The-Nate with the NES app, you could also use the X button for B

@AlienX
I wouldn't call 20 or so N64 games plenty, but I guess it's better than nothing.

@Toy_Link, what those 20 games would be and how frequently games for that platform are added is something to think about.

I literally only pay the subscription service for the backup of my save files in the cloud.

Something almost all other companies do for free. And tons of other companies do something comparable for free too (iCloud from apple, Dropbox, OneDrive, etc...)

So I guess, tnx Nintendo?

@Orpheus79V Yeaah, handheld only wouldn't be great, you want to have as many options as possible. So it's probably better to save it for a future console, one that brings back dual screens. Switch should definitely have NES, SNES, GB/GBC, N64, GBA, and GC, but that should be fine (if worse than the Wii U's VC selection).

Spread across a whopping 2 consoles

OLD does not equal CLASSIC

There are certainly many classics on the service, but it's mostly garbage.

@Bolt_Strike It was alright on Wii U, but how they handled screes were kinda crappy. There's plenty of games out there that don't require the touch screen, too. Even then, they could use the Joycons as a pointer....

I dip into the NES and SNES English and Japanese apps on my Switch from time to time, and though we’re missing some big franchises and totally lack the licensed games which I’d love to revisit after so long (Goonies, TMNT, Super Star Wars, etc), for the price I’d say it’s a decent deal.

There’s many great titles in there I had on cart but didn’t have the good sense to retain.

RYGAR APPROVED 👍🏼 😁

@Silly_G they pretty cheap on Ebay. Got one works like a charm!

@Faucet But 20 bucks a year is still a pretty sweet deal for most of these games.

'It's cheap though' is such a bad argument.

What if the 50 cent triple cheeseburger tasted terrible, would the price make it ok?

@Geostyle wait a MINUTE, DO CHARMS WORK?🤔🤯

@River3636 you said vomit a lot? You good playa?🤔🤢

i think the switch pro you will see N64 and gamecube games. a premium package for 60 bucks a year and a regular for still 20 bucks. just a guess but I could see this happen.

That sounds sort of impressive, until you remember that the Wii Virtual Console had around 400 games, including 169 titles from 6 distinct platforms within the console's first year in North America alone.

The NES titles leave a lot to be desired. The NES has a lot of gems that are not on their online service yet like Battle of Olympus, Star Tropics, Baseball Stars, Faxanadu, Guardian Legend and so on..
The SNES online service also has quite a few bad titles

@Joeynator3000 Maybe some of them can work, but not all of them. Pokemon fans keep begging for Ranger to come back, for example, but that won't work without the pinpoint precision of a touch screen. Same with Kirby Canvas Curse/Rainbow Curse. A lot of RPGs such as Pokemon make good use of the second screen for menu management and it doesn't quite feel the same without them on Switch. There are some very good DS and 3DS games that won't quite work as well on the Switch as is.

@Zacattack99 I'd still have to move my thumb up too high

I’m actually having some fun playing these at the moment. I agree the offering is a little stingy but as someone who never had a nes or SNES and grew up on 3D gaming, I appreciate retro games like these.

10 quid year is practically free for these games!

I'm not a fan of NSO, it's lacking in so many areas but i can't really argue that all these games are good value for money.

At £18 a year, for 100 games, i mean even if i low ball all the games and say their all worth £2 each, both the SNES and NES games.

Thats still £200 in value for the access to the free games for only £18 a year.

Like i said, not a fan of NSO and even if i don't care for those games, that is still ridiculous value for money.

The latest batch is verging on insulting.

@Razer,

Total agreement, the service could use some tweaking and not all these games are my cup of tea, and also feel they offer great value for money.

I also like to have a go at games that I would have never normally purchased, so it's a nice mix of Nintendo classics and more obscure titles.

Looks at ROM collection
That's nice

I would prefer if I could buy collections of games, like Donkey Kong Country trilogy.

@Tandy255 Mario celebration or Animal Crossing social network?😆

Besides, trying to predict calendar patterns with Nintendo? It's Nintendo Directs all over again.😏

I like how people argue for conserving games, but rag on NSO every chance they get.

Especially when a title they like isn't on the thing yet.

NSO may be lacking in some areas, but it does give me a chance to play a few old-school titles I've never played before.

@Geostyle It’s just that I love retro games and I have all the NES/ SNES on a Cool little GP wind handheld. So when I see the set up of this and what little crumbs they throw at us. I just want to hurl a chunk. I am kind of an RPG guy and all there is on there his breath of fire and breath of fire 2. I also still have my WiiU set up And have quite a collection from the Wii and WiiU virtual counsole. I was a fanatic back then. I have at least 200 games that I’ve purchased over the years. So when the online service started I was excited yet apprehensive. Sure it’s only $20, But to me it’s having me gag in a bad way. Hence the vomit comments.

+100 games is great. The issue is how long it's taken to get there. Eventually these will all go offline so I'd hope they pick up the pace or give us the option to purchase individual favourites like previous consoles

Only a handful of those games are actually interesting to any one person. Say what you will about VC but customizing what games are in your collection and paying pittens to have unlimited access to them is by far preferable to this lousy excuse.

And a lot of it is crap, despite there absolutely being 100+ truly great retro games that could be on there.

Because this is now a paid service and all these games and indeed online play is trapped behind this pay wall, I think it would have been far better if this were basically the equivalent of the original Wii Virtual Console on there for the price of admission, with all the various consoles and games that particular service had in its lifetime, which utterly craps on what Switch owners have got so far, from a very high height.

Basically, put the proper/full "Virtual Console" on there, and I mean a version that's even better and more complete and applicable to today's advances and gamer expections since the original Virtual Console first existed, and this service might be something of genuine worth.

How did Nintendo **** up something that started with such an utterly amazing initial idea and first great step back on the Wii--looking back now it's kinda mind boggling to recall just how good the Virtual Console was (and imagine what it could have been by now if Nintendo had just kept growing and building up that service and library for that last 15 years)--to get to where Switch owners are at now with a [paid] online service and retro game lineup that is ultimately pretty pathetic.

Imagine the rage and uproar if Microsoft was basically deleting and restarting its Xbox Live/Network service from scratch every generation....

The fact they are proud of this shows how they just aren’t listening

Capcom is still conspicuously missing. I thought Nintendo and Capcom were always sleeping at each other's house, so its odd to see this gap.

Look people, the switch is made for streaming. Nintendo are not stupid. They are acting like this so people don't realise what is going on. It's an end times ploy.

Classic? They mean ancient.

The vast majority are hardly what I would call classic, unless classic means any old crap now.

This just shows how completely out of touch Nintendo are, amazing games but everything else they do leaves a lot too be diseired

No Mega Man, Sonic, Castlevania, Earthbound, Mario RPG, Bonk, classic FF or DQ, and that's just the 16-bit era. If that really is what Nintendo remembers as classic games they must have had a s.h.it.t.y childhood 😄

@Crono1973 it's not an argument. When I rented games as a kid, I paid a lot more for a lot less. 20 bucks isn't bad for what you get. If your expecting free I guess you're in the wrong place.

@Papichulo, Capcom already released the Mega Man games via the Legacy collections, Sonic & Bonk aren’t even on the SNES, Konami already released Castlevania Anniversary collection, and it’s only a matter of time before Square-Enix rereleases the older Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games in a overpriced manner.

It isn’t Nintendo’s memory that’s at fault. Blame that on licensing and license holders finding supposedly better offers.

I’m paying 15 pounds a year for super Mario world and yes to have that privelidge is worth it to me xxx

next release will be: Chuck Rock, Bill Lamberts Combat Basketball, Lester the Unlikely, and Donkey Kong Math SP edition.

@Faucet If your expecting free I guess you're in the wrong place.

I am not expecting free, I am expecting a better service since it isn't free.