Nintendo Switch Online's NES games for April include Punch-Out!!, Star Soldier
And Mario's The Lost Levels for masochists.
Three more NES games are coming to Switch this month as part of Nintendo's online subscription service, with Punch-Out!!, Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, and Star Solider all confirmed for release on April 10th.
Punch-Out!! is, of course, the first console iteration of Nintendo's beloved arcade boxing series, which arrived on NES 1987. Its basic gameplay rhythm - which pits players against increasingly powerful foes in the ring, tasking them with spotting opponents' tells and figuring out the best response from a handful of moves - is still pretty engaging, even three and a bit decades on.
Offering number two, Super Mario Bros. The Lost Levels, is another winner, although its sadistic challenge probably isn't for everyone. It originally launched in Japan in 1986 as Super Mario Bros. 2, but was rejected for release in the west due to its extremely high difficulty.
Westerners were instead given a Mario-fied version of Nintendo's Doki Doki Panic as an alternative Super Mario Bros. 2, but the original Japanese NES game did eventually come west via the Wii's Virtual Console platform in 2007. And soon it'll be on Switch.
As for Star Soldier, it's the first entry in the Hudson-Soft-developed shoot-'em-up series of the same name, which initially launched on NES in 1986. Sadly, what with not being Eurogamer's resident shoot-'em-up expert Martin Robinson, about all I can tell you is that it involves going ever-upward and making stuff explode, although there's probably a little more nuance to it than that. Maybe I'll play it next week and find out.
Nintendo Online subscribers will gain access to all three titles when the NES app is updated at some point next Wednesday, April 10th.