Nintendo has unveiled its latest additions to the Switch Online library, and if you’ve never heard of these games, you may want to run back to your save of Elden Ring. No accessibility aids or contextual hints will be found in these titles, which are some of the hardest ever published on the NES.
We’ll get some of the easier ones out of the way. Golf, Donkey Kong Jr. Math, and Urban Champion are very well known, if somewhat minor, titles in the NES library, that have their fans in detractors. What may surprise you to learn is that Golf was one of the big moneymakers for the Famicom, with two versions of the game released on Nintendo’s arcade Vs. system, and two sequels on the Famicom Disk System.
Mach Rider is a surprisingly difficult vehicular combat game, developed by HAL Laboratory. This is a tense racer, requiring you to manage fuel and ammo while avoiding hazards and attacking other racers. The controls were so complex that you had to time pressing the up and a button at the same time to gear shift up. In spite of the garish colors, you may find an engaging challenge with this game.
Solar Jetman is an ambitious multidirectional shooter by developers Zippo Games and Rare. You have to navigate a small spacecraft through a planet with intense gravitational pull. But Jetman also has to explore the planet’s caverns to find fuel, and reassemble something called a Golden Warship.
There’s no boss pattern to memorize here, you will have to master the game’s inertia based physics to survive and win. But like a FromSoftware game, if your ship crashes, you can get a second chance. Your little Jetman will escape the ship, and as long as you can make it back to your main ship, you can keep going.
But let’s say you’re a sicko, and you enjoy unfair games. Rare also made a game called Cobra Triangle where you operate a speedboat with a Gradius style weapon upgrade system. You take the speedboat through several missions, from winning races, to a defusing bombs, to fighting bosses.
Unfortunately, Cobra Triangle‘s speedboat is even harder to control than Jetman’s ship, and it’s closer in difficulty curve to the vehicular sections in Rare’s Battletoads games. And yes, there will be missions where you can get taken down by an obstacle you didn’t see coming too. Good luck.
Finally, we cannot finish this without talking about Atlantis no Nazo, AKA The Mystery of Atlantis. Originally released in 1986 on the Famicom, this marks The Mystery of Atlantis’ first release outside Japan.
It’s also one of the most infamous games ever released on the console. Playing as an amateur adventurer named Wynn, you have to navigate Atlantis’ ruins to save your master. Wynn can use sticks of dynamite, but they have limited power, can bounce off, and many enemies simply won’t be hurt by them, like bats.
Wynn has harsher jump physics than Mario, so that you have to plan where you land before you even start. Touching an enemy, falling into many bottomless pits, or facing other hazards, dole out instant deaths. The game does have a lot of secrets to find, including power ups, but these are deliberately hidden from the player.
And the reason for this is the biggest cruelty of the 8-bit area. Unlike Hidetaka Miyazaki and Fromsoft, who design their games so that you can theoretically figure out how to get past a stage on your own, Sunsoft designed The Mystery of Atlantis in such a way that you also have to buy their strategy guide to learn its deep secrets, short of looking for all of it the hard way. If you thought FromSoftware didn’t hold players’ hands, you got another thing coming here.
But even with the guide, The Mystery of Atlantisis one of the most frustrating games you could possibly play, because of the unintuitive and difficult controls, and the long winding labyrinths of its levels. So I’m sure kaizo players are already salivating reading this now.
Are you up for the challenge of Switch Online’s latest offerings? Or are you going to run back to Shadow of the Erdtree? You can watch a trailer for Nintendo’s newest Switch Online games below.
