It’s a new month, which means two more NES games are coming to the Nintendo Switch’s Online service. This month, the two games we’re getting are Kid Icarus and StarTropics.
Nintendo recently announced that two often overlooked NES games, Kid Icarus and StarTropics, will be joining the Nintendo Switch Online NES lineup on March 13. Kid Icarus was originally released in 1986 before coming to the West the next year and is the first game to feature the character Pit, who would later gain popularity after joining the roster of 2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Different from the more recent Kid Icarus: Uprising, the original Kid Icarus is an action-platformer that put its own twist on the genre by featuring several levels that progress vertically, rather than horizontally. Meanwhile, StarTropics came out in 1990 and is a rare example of an NES game that originally released in the West and never came to Japan. The game is a top-down action-adventure that resembles The Legend of Zelda, though it does bring some of its own ideas to the table as well. Both titles were also packaged with the NES Classic Edition in 2016.
While these are the two games that are coming to the West this month, Japan’s Nintendo Switch Online NES lineup will be a bit different, as it normally is each month. The games Japan will be getting this month are Kid Icarus, the 1985 fighting game Yie Ar Kung-Fu, and the original Fire Emblem, which never received a Western localization.
