Celebrate the SNES’s 35th Birthday With the 5 Weirdest Switch Online Games

The Super Nintendo is 35 years old. The same as me. Rather than curling up and dying when I realized how much time has passed since 1991, I figured a better way to mark the occasion would be playing some SNES games.

I was five months old when the SNES launched in North America, an age hardly conducive to exploring the niche catalogue of a new console. I played Super Mario World and the video game versions of popular Disney movies, and then I moved on to PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, and so on. So when I opened the NSO app, I was surprised to find just how many unfamiliar-looking box covers were staring back at me and decided to check out as many as I reasonably had time for. Some hidden games deserve to stay that way forever (looking at you, Spanky’s Quest). But these five stuck with me and I’m glad I took the time for them.

5

Cosmo Gang The Puzzle

Namco’s falling block puzzle game is a charming riff on Tetris. I thought it would just be a quick, space-themed knock-off, but it’s one I found myself continually coming back to. You’re arranging falling blocks to clear lines, of course, but Cosmo Gang The Puzzle only gives you one block shape (always 2×1). The block might have aliens, some kind of space metal, or an arrow, or a combination of the three. Filling a line with metal blocks clears it, but the only way to clear the aliens is with one of those arrow squares. When you drop an arrow near an alien square, it clears it and races along the line (in any of the cardinal directions) to clear other aliens.

However! There has to be a path of alien squares for it to follow. The arrow square stops as soon as it hits a metal square. It’s not Puyo Puyo, obviously, but it adds a layer of strategy and planning ahead that I usually get with that series and not Tetris. I meant to play Cosmo Gang for about 20 minutes to get a general impression. A week later, I’m still playing it.

4

Mario and Wario

Image: Game Freak/Nintendo via Polygon

This one caught my eye. A Game Freak game starring Wario, my favorite little grubby, nasty villain? And one that required mouse controls? Yes, please. Turns out, Wario only shows up to cause occasional mischief, and I don’t really know why mouse controls are a thing here. Presumably to sell the accompanying SNES mouse peripheral at the time, but in very un-Nintendo fashion, they serve hardly any purpose that standard d-pad inputs couldn’t achieve.

You play as Wanda, a little fairy-type creature guiding Mario, Princess Toadstool, or Yoshi to the end of a stage. Wario dropped something on the hero, so they can’t see. Wanda uses their wand to activate blocks, bust rocks, and explode non-traditional enemies (apologies to the bat population of the Mushroom Kingdom, now in ruins after a magical massacre). Luigi waits at the end of the course to remove said object before it happens again. You can only control Wanda using the mouse, and it sucks! I dunno, maybe mouse-proficient people in the 1990s could just move faster than I can, or the sensitivity settings are off, or the Mouse-Con is just plain rancid.

Whatever the case, it felt like Wanda was always a half-step behind her obstructed charge. Frantically trying to keep up was stressful, and I only did three stages before deciding no, thank you, I will never play Mario and Wario again. It’s a shame, as the visual direction is lovely and as a prototype of Mario vs. Donkey Kong, it could be quite fun — if you could control Wanda with a D-pad. I don’t like it, but it’s a neat part of Nintendo history and worth playing for 15 minutes or so just to experience it.

3

Uncharted Waters: New Horizons

Image: Koei via Polygon

Koei really carved itself a strong niche in the historical games market in the 1990s. I knew about Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the various Nobunaga’s Ambition games on the SNES, but Uncharted Waters: New Horizons was new to me. Reader, it’s weird, in a good and often rather amusing way.

It’s the 16th century, the height of the Age of Exploration, and you pick one of several up-and-coming adventurers out to find fame and fortune. The goal is building a reputation by sailing the world and becoming supreme in naval combat, acquiring artifacts — it’s not the 1500s unless you’re stealing someone else’s culture, after all — or building a vast commercial empire.

There’s a wide selection of characters, each with different scenarios and strengths that, from what I can tell, do actually make for quite different playthroughs each time. I picked a snotty older man named Otto Baynes to start with. One day in London — which looks a lot like a town from Final Fantasy — a totally-not-visually-accurate Henry VIII of England charged my guy with beating back the Spanish by whatever means necessary. Then I tried Ernst Von Bohr, a Dutch cartographer who doesn’t give a rip about kings and wars and just wants to map the whole world.

Stories aside, it’s an unexpectedly gritty management simulator, with some decent naval combat and enjoyable exploration wrapped around it. I don’t know if I have the patience to do every scenario. But it’s definitely not the goofball game I expected and one worth checking out if only to see how deep Koei went down the simulation-strategy rabbit hole.

2

Wild Guns

Image: Nastume via Polygon

Natsume’s Wild Guns might not strike you as odd. But to me, unaware that arcade-style shooting galleries still had life beyond Wild Gunman in the age of the console, this one, with its proud declaration of cowboys and robots on the cover, seemed rather out of place. Reader, it’s ridiculously fun. Maybe there’s a story, but I dunno what it is. You play as Clint the Cowboy or Annie the… not-a-cowboy. Anyway, Annie gets her gun, a lasso to immobilize targets, and what I think might be a bazooka for some screen-wide explosive finishers. Clint also has a gun, a lasso, and a screen wipe in the form of TNT that I guess he had the foresight to plant at some undisclosed time before the mission.

You also get machine guns, that most suitable and unsurprising weapon in a cowperson’s arsenal.

Wild Guns drops you in stages that blend sci-fi — it’s kinda more steampunk, really — and Old West, with saloons and ruffians, street thugs astride futuristic-looking tanks, gigantic robots wearing cowboy attire, and weird shells that open to reveal rows of turrets. It’s fast-paced and frantic, but strikes a good balance between being unforgiving and fairly easy to get into. I always thought shooting galleries were a bit boring, but Wild Guns is absolutely going in my rotation from now on.

1

Amazing Hebereke

Image: Sunsoft via Polygon

I don’t have a clue what’s happening in Amazing Hebereke, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying it. The idea, as far as I can tell from the Japanese-only text, is that a group of exceptionally cute little animals have decided to beat the metaphorical stuffing out of each other for fun, and they’re holding a tournament on their cute little fantasy island. You pick a fighting critter, and you’re matched against a single opponent. Defeat them three times — I don’t know why it’s three, but after flattening the soft bear twice, I felt kinda bad doing it a third time — and you move on to the next round. Later matches add multiple fighters and some stage obstacles, though it’s never that challenging. Marvel Tokon, this is not.

Which is fine by me. I suck at fighting games. Yes, even the “approachable for everyone” Street Fighter 6 is too much for me. I can beat up a teddy bear with the best of them, though. There’s a surprising variety of combos for such a casual fighting game, too. My little whatever-the-hell-it-was guy could pull off aerial kicks, strings of punches, backflips, and after using a different combo, could even toss their head out on an extendable neck. It’s weirdly relaxing for a beat-’em-up, maybe on account of the pastel colors and soft music, and I’m planning on going through the whole roster at least once.