Switch Online’s latest retro games are better than you think

digitaltrends.com:

On May 26, Nintendo announced that it was adding Congo’s Caper, Rival Turf!, and Pinball to the NES/SNES library on Nintendo Switch Online. The fan reaction was similar to the response after every one of these announcements: Overwhelming negativity.

On Twitter, most of the reactions to this announcement are complaining about this new lineup of games, begging for Super Mario RPG and other missing classic titles to be added, and claiming that Nintendo is lazy and not trying with these new additions. When classic titles like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars don’t come to the service in the update, any additions are immediately derided. While there are certainly areas of Nintendo’s approach to Nintendo Switch Online worth criticizing, this backlash raises an important question: Do people really want classic games preserved or just the ones they’ve heard of?

Nowadays in gaming discourse, players are quick to judge and immensely deride something if they’re displeased with one aspect of it. We’ve routinely seen that with Switch Online updates, but the knee-jerk reactions overlook some of the critical preservation the service is doing.

Pinball, for example, might seem like an outdated game at this point, but it was the first commercially released game from the partnership between Kirby developer HAL Laboratory and Nintendo. Its release helped cement HAL Laboratory’s relationship with Nintendo and former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s reputation.

“Looking back, the games that we developed in those days all involved big software ideas where the client was quite sure how to pull it off,” Iwata recalled about Pinball’s development and the early days of the Nintendo partnership in a writing featured in the Ask Iwata