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- New Game Boy and Game Boy Advance additions land on Nintendo Switch Online, proving the service still has plenty left to give.
- You can essentially trick the system into treating an online session like local play.
- There's still room for Nintendo to speed things up, but overall, what's currently on offer makes it hard to complain too much.
New Game Boy and Game Boy Advance additions land on Nintendo Switch Online, proving the service still has plenty left to give.
Nintendo Switch Online just received a solid batch of new titles through its Game Boy and Game Boy Advance Classics apps, and there's a lot here worth getting excited about. On the Game Boy side, The Sword of Hope, Fortified Zone, and Wario Land™: Super Mario Land™ 3 have all been added to the lineup.
Over on Game Boy Advance, subscribers are getting Dr. Mario & Puzzle League, which is technically two games bundled into one. Nintendo confirmed all of these additions directly, so there's no guesswork involved. Here's where your subscription tier matters.
The Game Boy app is available to anyone with a standard Nintendo Switch Online membership. The Game Boy Advance app, though, sits behind Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack. So if you want Dr. Mario & Puzzle League, or GameCube titles down the road, the Expansion Pack is the tier you'll need.
As for cost, the Expansion Pack currently runs about $50 a year in the US, though pricing can shift depending on where you live. Japan recently saw a price increase, though the exact conversion isn't clear. The standard membership, meanwhile, sits at around $20 a year, which works out to next to nothing per month.
Even at that lower price, you still get Game Boy titles and Super Nintendo games, so there's real value without upgrading. If you do go with the pricier tier, the new additions make the upgrade feel a lot more worthwhile.
Honestly, the biggest draw of Nintendo Switch Online isn't replaying old classics, it's the online multiplayer built into the app.
You can essentially trick the system into treating an online session like local play.
This means you and your friends can play together over the internet even without built-in matchmaking. Any title with multiplayer support works this way as long as everyone joins the same room. That feature alone makes the membership feel worth keeping around.
Nintendo isn't rolling out GameCube games as fast as fans want, and the Game Boy Advance library is growing slower than plenty of people would like too. Still, when you look at the full catalog built up so far, it's genuinely impressive.
That growth is part of why Nintendo Switch Online now has more subscribers than XBOX Game Pass, which is a wild stat considering how much Microsoft has poured into Game Pass as its flagship service. Nobody really expected a company like Microsoft to end up behind Nintendo here, especially given how people talked about Nintendo Switch Online early on.
Back when Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack first launched, plenty of people wrote it off as a scam and criticized Nintendo for not giving it room to grow. Since then, the library has expanded significantly, and public opinion has shifted a lot more positive as a result. Nintendo keeps adding to it steadily, even if the pace doesn't always satisfy everyone.
There's still room for Nintendo to speed things up, but overall, what's currently on offer makes it hard to complain too much.
Dr. Mario & Puzzle League stands out as one of the more exciting additions here. Game Boy Advance games have always had a certain charm, with vibrant visuals and audio that still hold up well. It's one of those systems where owning the hardware didn't always translate into a big game library, since plenty of people had the console without the funds to build out a collection back in the day.
That makes new additions like this feel like a chance to finally catch up on what was missed. The Game Boy additions carry a similar story, since a lot of people never had the money to buy into that library either. These games might look a little rough by today's standards, but their reputation as quality titles has held up over time.
Wario Land in particular has people talking, and it's easy to see why given how much fun the game is known for. At the end of the day, Nintendo continuing to expand Nintendo Switch Online with more games is a good sign, and it's exactly the kind of steady growth that keeps the membership feeling worth it.
