The next batch of games that will be available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers has been revealed on the official Nintendo website. It seems that the next games will be Donkey Kong Jr., Clu Clu Land, and Vs. Excitebike.
Donkey Kong Jr. was one of the three launch titles for the Famicom in Japan. It’s a platform game where Mario is the villain who kidnapped Donkey Kong and it’s up to Donkey Kong Junior to save his father from imprisonment. The original Donkey Kong involved Mario running across platforms and jumping over barrels, while Donkey Kong Jr. involves climbing vines and knocking items down onto enemies.
Clu Clu Land is a top-down puzzle game where the player has to navigate a balloonfish through a maze in order to uncover gold coins while avoiding sea urchins and black holes.
The most exciting game on the list is Vs. Excitebike, which was originally only released in the arcades and for the Famicom Disk System in Japan. Vs. Excitebike has several different features than the original, including a two-player mode, an entirely new soundtrack, a mode based on the arcade version of the game, and the ability to save tracks that were created by the player. Vs. Excitebike has been released on the Virtual Console in the past and was made available on the Wii U in 2015.
It’s good to see Nintendo adding three games to the Nintendo Switch Online service again, as there was a run of several months where countries outside of Japan only received two games. The addition of more games from Japan is a great benefit of Nintendo Switch Online, but the lineup of titles is otherwise pretty lackluster. With E3 2019 around the corner, we can only hope that the leaked Super Nintendo games will be added to the service in order to make it worth the money that fans are paying to subscribe.
No release date has been given for the next batch of Nintendo Switch Online games, but it will most likely be either the 8th or 9th of May, depending on the region of the player.
