Today in righting terrible wrongs:

So despite being a grown-up with you know, a job, I'm still into video games. Like, something I started when I was maybe four. Which, look, I make no apologies.

I regret nothing! Well, except maybe not buying a copy of
Stadium Events in 1987, and taking up an instrument.

Above: Final Fantasy III being objectively
better than everything that came after.

Anyway, as a grown-ass man child, I also have strong opinions about video games. Specifically that mobile games are universally garbage, video games as an art form peaked in the mid-nineties and that Super Mario Bros. 2 is criminally underrated. Yeah, I'm one of those. So I have some mixed emotions about the Switch online service and-hang on, if you're not even marginally interested in video games, you'll probably want to bail out now. We're about to get into the weeds. The nerd weeds and you may not respect me afterwards. Huh? You didn't? Oh, well, nothing to lose them. Super. Let's press on, shall we?

Clearly Jake never saw Ebay coming.

So back in the mid 2000's Nintendo started re-releasing a lot of its classic games on Virtual Console which was a download service where you could buy old Nintendo and even Sega and TG-16 games without having to find a used game store where half the cartridges have some kid's name sharpie'd on them. If you know what I'm talking about, we are kindred spirits. If you don't, well, please stop judging us. Anyway, it was great. Well, except for the fact that we were often buying games we already owned. Like a bunch of chumps. Which we are. Again, no apologies.

The gaming equivalent of somebody's
 unqualified relative...holy shit, is Ice
Climber the Jared Kushner of games?

But time marched on and Virtual Console isn't a thing any more. Instead we have the Switch online service which instead of selling you retro games, it just gives you access to them. The service is cheap and I feel less like a chump. Win/win, right? Eh. It's got the stand-by's like Zelda and Super Mario 3 and wackier stuff like River City Ransom and Twin Bee, but then there's shit like Ice Climber. A game which Nintendo trots out at the drop of a hat, but one which literally no one ever has had anything but disdain for.

Of course it is, and one of the better ones.
Better than Super Mario 1. Come at me. 

Like any good beggar being a chooser, I was kind of annoyed about some of the more glaring oversights like Final Fantasy, Contra and most unforgivably, Super Mario Bros. 2. Yeah, the weird one. I'll spare you the nonsense debate about how SMB2 is not a real Mario game, but it certainly deserves a place in the line up before freaking Solomon's Key. SMB 2 had better graphics than SMB 1, introduced the throwing mechanic, and made the Princes a playable character. Yes, it's different from the other games, but that's not a bad thing. Not to get all 'back in my day,' but back in my day developers were less afraid to try different things.

They're good games, but the only real
difference is who, specifically, you
assassinate. Pirates, doges, Redcoats.
It gets a little same-y after a while.

Zelda II was a side-scroller, the Ninja Turtles sequel was actually good, and while Castlevania II was a poorly translated mess, at least it wasn't a rehash. On the other hand, there've been like ten mainline Assassin's Creed games that other than new settings and some gameplay tweaks, are pretty damn similar to one another. And I get that. Games now take hundreds of people to develop and cost something like fifty million dollars. They can't take risks. But in 1988 Nintendo just took a re-skinned promotional game, slapped some Mario characters in it and released it as the sequel to their most popular game to date.

"Fuck you you rancid fuck!"

-tweens

But despite being great, we couldn't play it on Switch until last week when Nintendo announced that SMB2 is finally being added along with Kirby, bringing the total to thirty three games and thus righting possibly the greatest injustice ever in the history of-hang on, I should walk that back, because you know, perspective. This was the greatest video-game related, but non swatting-related, non-shit-talking tween with Xbox Live-related injustice of the past few months. See? We're not all rabid-foam insane, basement dwelling trolls. I mean, I live in a studio.

"The poor fools...they destroyed themselves
before getting to the StarTropics re-release."

But now here's the part where I turn into one of those jerk fans who despite the fact that twenty bucks a year is pretty reasonable for the online service, is going to ask: what about the other seven hundred NES games? I know it's not as simple as dragging and dropping a game on to the service, and a lot of games have licensing and legal wrinkles to iron out, but with two or three new games being added a month, putting the entire back catalogue up would take over four thousand years. Will we even be around that long?

Someone recently hacked a Switch update and found code that suggested that a bunch of SNES games are heading to the service and that's fantastic, even if it does mean they'll up the price. Which I'll pay because, as we discussed before, I am a chump. But let's just hope they speed up the release rate. I mean the planet only has so long.

Huh? Oh, right. So much for perspective.