Nintendo has updated their Nintendo Switch Online offerings for Famicom, Game Boy, and Super Nintendo. Note that these are all on platforms on the basic tier, so everyone subscribed gets them added to their respective apps.
Let’s start by looking at the little known Mystery Tower. Some older fans may be confused why they’ve never heard of this game. Actually, this is Nintendo’s English localization of Babel no Tou, AKA, Tower of Babel.
Mystery Tower is one of those odd Famicom games that never left Japan, but Nintendo worked with Namco to release it in English on their platforms. This game originally released on the Wii U Virtual Console.
And this game is a one screen classic puzzler, taking some inspiration from the sokoban genre, and some from Lode Runner.
You play a funny little Namco OC called Indy Borgnine, trying to get to the top of the Tower of Babel, where he is actually in. He can move L-shaped blocks and climb them like staircases, and he can also climb vines.
While it’s nowhere near as thrilling as Catherine, if you do like those small single screen puzzle games, this one holds up as a nice little diversion.
On the Game Boy app we get Blaster Master: Enemy Below and Kirby Tilt N’Tumble, both on the Game Boy Color.
Blaster Master: Enemy Below is the fourth game in the Blaster Master series, and stands as something of a remake, or perhaps more fittingly, remix, of the NES original. The gameplay is mostly design, with overworld levels using the tank Sophia, and underground levels where you move on foot as Jason. Blaster Master: Enemy Below adds upgrades you have to find, making backtracking more worthwhile. While all these games would eventually pale in comparison to Blaster Master Zero, this is still a fun little game, especially if you’re really into Metroidvanias.
Kirby Tilt N’Tumble is probably the standout of this latest batch of Switch Online games. You move Kirby by tilting your console in the direction he is supposed to go, as if he is the marble in a marble maze. You can also get Kirby to jump, AKA pop, by flipping your console quickly as if you were cooking pancakes.
On the Game Boy Color, Nintendo pulled this off by inserting an accelerometer on the cart, but today, Nintendo emulates this perfectly using the Nintendo Switch’s built-in gyro and accelerometers.
So you can do all this using separated Joy-Cons, but if you do want to simulate the original experience, we recommend playing with the Joy-Cons connected, or if you have one, playing it on a Nintendo Switch Lite.
Finally, on the SNES app we get Bokujo Monogatari. This is the first game in what was originally known in the west as the Harvest Moon franchise.
The first few Harvest Moon games were English versions of Bokujo Monogatari. However, since 2013, Natsume has transferred Harvest Moon as its own franchise, while XSeed games has continued localizing these games under the new title, Story of Seasons.
This version retains its original title, Harvest Moon. But really, without this history lesson, all you need to know is that this is the original Stardew Valley all the way back in the 1990s. While there may be some QOL updates that have been brought to the genre, this is essentially the same game.
A lot of fun games have now been added in to Switch Online, nicely complementing the recent rerelease of the Game Boy Advance versions of the Super Mario Bros games.
