Nintendo Switch Online Still Kinda Sucks
The Mario maker ditched 'Virtual Console' and made something even worse
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Switch Online launched in 2018. It felt like a breath of fresh air after years of re-buying the same overpriced retro Nintendo games on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS “Virtual Consoles.” It gave access to a bunch of NES and SNES classics for just $20 a year. But the libraries were slow to get built up, and then Nintendo locked N64 heavy-hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask behind a new, bigger annual price tag. Game Boy Advance games finally joined the service last year and now Golden Sun fans can play the beloved pixel-art RPG for the low, low price of just $50 a year, in perpetuity.
Nintendo’s Virtual Console was never a great solution to the problem of supplying new fans with access to its vast back catalog, but Switch Online has turned out to be even worse. In exchange for less hassle and a lower upfront cost, Nintendo lets Switch players download dozens of hits from across NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance, complete with save states and fair to decent emulation. In exchange, however, players have sacrificed the ability to buy games a la carte and digitally “own” them without being subject to monthly fees and weekly DRM server checks.
Nowhere is the nickel-and-diming more apparent than in the fact that Expansion Pack tier subscriptions, which house the majority of the Switch Online collection at this point, require you to invest in an entire year’s subscription with no option to pay month-by-month. As I pointed out on Twitter, this effectively means that anyone who wants to play Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age, which arrived on the platform this week, will need to pay $50 just to rent them. They were $8 each when they came to Wii U back in 2014. That’s not quite the Switch Online future we all dreamed off nearly six years ago. It’s a great deal at the beginning, but once you’ve had your fill you’re basically being blackmailed every time you want to pick up an old Mario game again.
As my honeymoon period with video game subscriptions continues to wear off, I’ve increasingly found that I don’t actually need or want access to as many games as PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass, or even Switch Online allows. I’d be much happier paying for a few of the ones I really want and giving them the time and attention they deserve. There’s a universe where instead of spending $50 a year on the Expansion Pack I just buy Golden Sun, Super Mario World, Ocarina of Time, Donkey Kong Country, and a few other classics I truly care about revisiting.
With Switch it finally feels like Nintendo has a platform worth carrying into the future and capable of making the journey. As speculation about the Switch 2 grows, the thing I want more than anything else is for Nintendo to just copy Microsoft’s approach to backwards compatibility and old games. The Xbox store is the most robust and reliable storefront in the console space at the moment. It makes a lot more sense than porting an NES Fire Emblem to Switch only to remove it from the eShop months later and never add it to the Switch Online library.
One of the great ironies of Nintendo is how player-friendly their games are while almost everything else about the experience, at least in the modern setting, is so user-hostile. Here’s an observation from a recent profile of Shigeru Miyamoto that’s been rattling around my brain rent-free since it dropped back in December: “And as Miyamoto points out, you can sell an excellent thing forever: 1985’s original Super Mario Bros. has been re-released several times and has sold more than 60m copies. You can still play it on Switch.”
What a disastrous big-budget video game marketing campaign looks like
Since Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was first revealed back in August 2020 it’s been a long, weird road for the licensed live service shooter nobody asked for. Fans reacted positively to the initial teaser which looked like a traditional Rocksteady Studios action game about super villains instead of the hero of its beloved Batman: Arkham trilogy.
Despite a 2022 release window, however, the game was eventually delayed until May 2023. Creative director and studio co-founded, Sefton Hill, announced his departure from Rocksteady in October 2022. By early 2023, leaked screenshots revealed a live service eye-soar, and a deep-dive into co-op gameplay and loot shooter elements in a PlayStation State of Play went down among fans like a lead balloon. The trailers were down-voted on YouTube five to one. In April, the game got delayed again until February 2024. When it finally re-emerged late last year, Rocksteady Studios deployed a series of mini-documentaries about the game on YouTube. It also invited players to try a closed alpha test for Suicide Squad and invited press and content creators to demo the game the week of The Game Awards in Los Angeles.
The previews from that event went live last week and were a mixed bag, but the one that caught everyone’s attention was IGN’s unusually opinionated headline reading, “We Played It and Didn't Like It.” It was exactly what you want from a preview, which is a subjectively-framed, clear-cut takeaway from someone’s limited time with a small slice of a big game.
It was off-script though, and some fans mocked previewer Destin Legarie for “playing wrong” in captured footage, while others dunked on him for appearing to take issue with criminals doing criminal things in the line, “From enslaving a child form of Poison Ivy, to straight up watching your heroes murder people, there’s a lot here to make you feel a bit uncomfortable about the journey you’re being taken on.” A former designer on Suicide Squad called for Rocksteady to drop the NDA on the alpha playtest from around the same time, the buzz about which had been much more positive. The studio eventually did exactly that, a seeming act of desperation as the narrative around the game continued spiraling out of control.
One upshot of this “fuck you” to the games press was the creation of my favorite preview Suicide Squad so far by YouTuber SkillUp. He said he was denied access to the December press event but had played the alpha, and with the NDA lifted put together a 20-minute reflection on what he liked and didn’t like about what he played. “I played the Suicide Squad game (and I didn't hate it),” read the video’s title in reaction to the IGN preview, but it ended up damning the game with faint praise in a worse way that any of the existing coverage. SkillUp’s assessment essentially boiled down to: the story’s good, traversal is fun, combat is mid, and the live service pitch seems dead on arrival. No wonder he didn’t get invited to the official preview event.
This might sound like good news for fans of Rocksteady’s storytelling who just want a solid shooter story campaign they can experience with friends, and maybe that’s exactly what Suicide Squad will offer. But I’m much more pessimistic about Rocksteady’s ability to meld together cinematic storytelling and cookie-cutter shooter quests like defending a point or fighting off waves of enemies. As a Destiny loot sicko, I was, if anything, looking forward to the prospect of spending 100 hours grinding through Suicide Squad to craft Diablo-style builds and take-on Borderlands-like end-game dungeons. Without that I’m left with an always-online campaign where every piece of gameplay footage gives me Crackdown 3 vibes.
I hope that’s somehow not the case, and Rocksteady hasn’t fallen into the trap of so many other beloved studios that have been ground down into husks beyond recognition working on fundamentally unsound designs to appease suits in a boardroom (see BioWare’s Anthem and Arkane’s Redfall). Rocksteady deserves better. Its fans deserve better. Executives like David Zaslav can go shit a brick.
Console war cope intensifies
Shortly after last week’s newsletter was sent out, Stephen Totilo at Game File reported that Microsoft was looking at bringing Sea of Thieves to PlayStation at one point. It was another boron rod in the Xbox reactor as diehard fans confront the company’s mixed-messaging on the future of the platform and first-party exclusivity. And now, as spotted by Totilo in Microsoft’s shareholder meeting minutes from December, CEO Satya Nadella has thrown more fuel on the fire with a comment about bringing games to other platforms:
We think that now, we have the ability to really do what we’ve always set out to do, which is build great games and deliver them to folks across all platforms, right, which is Xbox and consoles, the PCs, and now even including mobile gaming and cloud gaming.
Is that “and consoles” just sloppy misspeak or is it further confirmation that Microsoft plans to bring certain existing exclusives to competitors storefronts as it struggles to expand the audience for Xbox hardware? I’m sure Microsoft will clear this up all sooner rather than later. It’s first big Developer Direct showcase of 2024 is Thursday at 3:00 p.m. ET.
An update on Microsoft Rewards
The company’s partially reversed the great “nerfmas” of 2023. Microsoft Reward amounts have gone back to what they were before for various activities, and the Xbox Game Pass quests now give a bonus 500 points for daily play streaks. Catch me mainlining points the rest of this month while I finish off Lies of P, Remnant II, and Persona 5 Tactica.
Keep scrolling
It’s been 10 days since the first newsletter and a lot of links have been building up in my copy and paste clipboard. I’ll try to get through the rest of them rapid-fire:
Starfield was supposed to finally get its first major update today but the patch was delayed until later in the week over an undisclosed “issue.” Bethesda has been surprisingly slow to retool the admittedly massive open world action-RPG compared to the cadence of patches for similar games like Cyberpunk 2077 and, more recently, Baldur’s Gate III.
Multiplayer real-time strategy game hybrid Minecraft Legends came out less than a year ago and it’s already done getting updates. “Since launch, we've listened to community feedback and implemented a series of changes and tweaks to make the game better,” Mojang wrote on January 10. “With that complete, we're now going to take a step back from development.”
A GamerGater and a victim of the online harassment movement finally find common ground over Israel’s war crimes.
Sony’s shutdown of the Gran Turismo Sport servers is another sign of gaming’s always-online nightmare. “But I hate it when companies design dependencies into their games knowing they're one day going to break and leave paying customers with no way to enjoy the thing they paid for,” writes Gamesindustry.biz’s Brendan Sinclair. “And not because the thing in question fundamentally can't exist without an online connection, but because someone decided to design the thing to break as soon as it was convenient for the company.”
Final Fantasy The Spirits Within's motion capture director Remington Scott spills the crystals on the movie’s development, failure, and lasting impact.
An obscure PS2 game you’ve never heard of is at long last getting a fan translation into English. Rowdy Princess will be the next project by translation group Hilltop Works. The Japanese RPG looks incredible. The group recently finished My Summer Vacation 2. Fans are clamoring for the group to eventually tackle Linda Cubed.
Smite skins players paid for won’t carry over to Smite 2. The MOBA sequel was announced at the Smite 2024 championship and the developers addressed the backlash surrounding the move, blaming the shift to Unreal Engine 5 for the new game for why players’ existing inventories won’t carry over.
A newly discovered Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom glitch lets you auto-hit bosses until your weapons break while watching memories during fights. “Once you do that, just unpause the game…And voila!” writes CM30 at Gaming Reinvented. “The enemy will drop dead instantly, and you’ll have won the battle. It really is that simple!”
New research shows that Google search really has gotten worse, with top-ranking sites bloated with optimized garbage, affiliate links, and even AI-spam in some instances. You should really listen to the Remap podcast’s recent interview with RPGSite.net editor-in-chief, Alex Donaldson, about how most digital games media probably won’t survive the coming SEO apocalypse.
Hasan Piker interviews a Yemeni “pirate” influencer
Massive Twitch streamer and political leftist, Hasan Piker, elicited outrage after interviewing the man behind a viral TikTok video supporting Houthi rebel attacks on Israeli ships and ships trading with Israel. He’s apparently a 19-year old named Rashid who said he wanted to show support for Palestine amid its ongoing bombardment and humanitarian devastation amid Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza.
Forbes reports that Rashid, called “Timhouthi Chalamet” by some because of his similar appearance to the Dune star in a recent video, said through a translator that the “only motivation that they have is their solidarity with Palestine and to stop the attack on Palestine.” He appears to be the one behind several viral videos depicting Call of Duty-style cinematic raids of the Bahamas-flagged Galaxy Leader cargo ship back in November 2023.
Twitch restricts content that “depicts, glorifies, encourages, or supports terrorism.” The Biden administration previously took the Houthis off its terrorist list in 2021, but just today it decided to add them back to the list following the ship seizure and U.S. claims of attacks on other ships and civilians. The U.S. recently launched missile strikes against Houthi targets in Northern Yemen to “protect shipping lanes.” Rashid apparently told Piker the bombings were “nothing new for Yemenis,” with the U.S. backing Saudi Arabia’s violent involvement in Yemen’s civil war.
Okay, just a few more things
This IGN list of the 25 best Game Boy Advance games is truly unhinged.
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is really mad about Apple trying to cheat its way out of a court order.
The Switch Pro controller battery really does last forever.
Nicki Minaj tried to fight with game developers online over her use of AI-generated art.
The video game manual is soooo back.
More super short game reviews please.
Another spiritual successor to Total Annihilation is looking for funding and this one looks wilder than ever.
ABRISS: build to destroy is a sci-fi destruct-athon that looks really neat and is coming to consoles after debuting on Steam last year.