Every addition to Nintendo’s online catalog of classic games is a welcome one. Not least because there’s no reason on Earth that the company doesn’t just add them all at once, given they’ll sue you into the sun if you try to play the 30-year-old games by any other means. But this latest update for the SNES collection in what’s now called Nintendo Classics, alongside a Bubsy and a Fatal Fury, features a Mario game that’s never been released outside of Japan before.
Let’s do Bubsy In: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind first. You have to forgive the double-punning title, because the SNES and Genesis release was extremely well received in 1993. The first of eight Bubsy platform games (with a ninth to come next year from an increasingly desperate Atari), the nothing-like-a-bobcat Bubsy sets out to save…balls of yarn. Not exactly high-peril stakes, but a classic piece of 16-bit platforming with an animation style you just don’t see any more.
Next up is Fatal Fury: Special, a 1994 SNES release following its 1993 arcade debut. It was the third game in the Fatal Fury fighting game franchise, and essentially an improved version of 1992’s Fatal Fury 2. It added previously CPU-only boss characters to the fighting roster, and rather significantly added combos to the series. It has looped around in the past, with an Xbox Arcade release in 2007, a Wii version in 2009, and then yet again appeared on consoles in 2017. While the Neo Geo version is generally thought to be the best, this is obviously an emulation of the SNES port.
The final addition is certainly the most intriguing. Mario & Wario was put out for the Super Famicom in 1993, but then never went on to receive a worldwide release—even though the game was entirely in English. But now the rest of the world can finally discover this peculiar Lemmings-like puzzle-platformer featuring Mario stumbling around levels with objects obscuring his view after Wario wedged them over his head. You play as Wanda, a fairy, who magics the levels’ platforms to keep Mario safe and guide him to Luigi who’ll pull the object off his noggin. And she did all this using the SNES’s mouse peripheral. So yes, with the Switch 2’s mouse-like controllers, that’s achievable once more.
Because these are SNES games, they’re included in the basic, cheaper version of Nintendo’s Switch Online subscription package, rather than the nonsensically named “+ Expansion Pack” higher tier. So, that’s the $20 a year version, unfortunately necessary if you want to play any Switch games online or use the save cloud feature. The Expansion Pack addition bumps it up to $50 a year (so, you know, two months of Game Pass) and adds in GameCube, N64, Genesis and GBA catalogs, as well as “free” DLC for a few Nintendo games.
