Just in time for the Game Boy’s 35th anniversary, Nintendo has quietly dropped three more classics on to the Game Boy app on the Switch Online service.
The headline of the three is Super Mario Land, the first time Mario appeared on the console. Today, this game comes across as an oddity in the way it is designed and plays, but it really is a classic little platformer and those ideas that distinguish it from how most other Mario games play give it a fresh and interesting quality.
I played this game so much as a kid. The Game Boy was my first console, and that Christmas that it was under the tree I also got three games – of which Super Mario Land was one (the others were Tetris – of course, it was a pack-in – and Shanghai Mahjong). I played this game so much I wore the cartridge out and had memorised every single hidden secret.
The other two games are Alleyway, Nintendo’s own Breakout clone and one of the first four games ever designed for the Game Boy, and Baseball, which was a Game Boy port of the NES original. Neither of these games will occupy you for hundreds of hours, but they’re fun pieces of historical curiosity and exactly the kind of thing Switch Online should be preserving. And there are plenty of people that have strong nostalgia for Baseball in particular, as one of the first real sports simulations that was playable on the go.
As always it would be nice to see Nintendo dropping more on to these platforms – the Game Boy and GBA apps in particular simply do not reflect the breadth of what was available on each console – but every new release is welcome anyway.
