Exploring the Switch's Nintendo Classics #4

Been a while since I last did one of these as well! It took me this long because, in-between reviews of other games, I could hardly find the time to play stuff from the Nintendo Classics service; however, I think I’ve found a system that could help me with that.

Before I start this article, I guess I might take this introduction to explain a thing or two: For starters, all I have is the classic Switch, not the sequel console released in 2025. As a result, while I do try to go through the games available on Nintendo Classics, I do not have access to the GameCube games that were announced for the Switch 2 exclusively. This also extends to whichever games on other consoles require a mouse to play, like Mario Paint. (Not that there are many of those.)

In the same vein, Nintendo began releasing Virtual Boy titles to the service in February 2026. I am very tempted to try these as well, and since many of these are short, they will fit perfectly in articles like the one here. However, I am told that they will work much better with a headset currently on sale. I do think I will be better off playing those games with the necessary equipment! Therefore, I’ll skip these for now and put them on the backburner. It’s not like I’ve got a shortage of Nintendo Classics games to cover anyway!

I was in a bit of a hurry to get this article ready for publication, so instead of waiting to have enough entries from just one console, here you have a pot-pourri of games from almost all the consoles that are part of the service. And just like my other collections, any progress is better than nothing!

Enjoy!

The NES

That is, indeed, baseball.

Baseball: I’m still not done with sport games! This game was one more of the console’s launch titles, and is about as straightforward as can be for an 8bit representation of the sport. Pitcher pitches, batter hits the ball, team on the field hurries to get the ball and throw it while the batter runs around the diamond. I’ll admit that I know little about baseball (most of my gaming experience with baseball is… Mario Super Sluggers). And this game explains very little, so I know the basics of the sport, but I was left to figure out the controls on my own. I did poorly at this one. While I can say there’s a few NES sports games I would come back to, this isn’t one of them. I can still appreciate that its release at the console’s launch helped further boost the NES’s popularity in North America.

Make sure not to drive into someone else.
Or jump and land on another biker.

Excitebike: I covered the VS. version in article #2, now I cover the original. Excitebike, a launch title, bears the same gameplay involving your bike racer going through racetracks with bumps and other hazards. You can go at an average speed by holding down A, not incurring the risk of your bike overheating; or go faster by holding B, with a risk of overheating and having to stop the bike for several wasted seconds. There are three modes: In Selection A, it’s just you and your bike, though your time is compared to the other racers and you can only progress by finishing two laps quicker than the goal time, earning you a spot on the podium and into the next race, with five courses to complete. The second is Selection B, which features the same courses, but with CPU racers on the tracks, leading to risks of wipeouts and crashes. Finally, a Design Mode lets you create your own course! Vs. Excitebike had more courses, but the original is easier to learn since you can choose to focus on tracks with or without CPU racers, at your liking, instead of having to play each track both ways.

Wa-ka-wa-ka-wa-ka-wa-ka

Pac-Man: A classic! First released in arcades in August 1980 (and later ported to the NES), this title joined Nintendo Classics on April 9th, 2026. Pac-Man travels the maze, eating every pellet and avoiding the ghosts, each of which has its own pattern. He can eat a power pellet to turn the ghosts blue and slow them down, allowing him to eat them and, thus, incapacitate them momentarily. A level is cleared when Pac-Man has eaten every single pellet. For ease of travel, there is a teleportation path that takes Pac from one side of the screen to the other, and will slow down ghosts chasing after him through it. How many levels can you clear? I am not that great at this one, I survive three levels at best, but I respect a classic. It’s plenty fun.

The SNES

Sometimes, the weather gets in on the fun.

Amazing Hebereke: Another fighting game from this console? Yes, but it’s very different to those I covered in my last Nintendo Classics article. In this game all in Japanese, you play as a penguin in a tuque (That's how we Canadians call beanies) punching and kicking the shit out of other cute animals (or people dressed as animals) on a ring. This leads to several differences: You play against up to three opponents, even in the Story Mode. The bird’s eye view allows for movement all around the ring. In a fight against at least two other opponents, fallen adversaries stay on the field as slimes and can get in the way of the remaining fighters’ moves. Stages may include hazards, which the fighters can use to their advantage. Like all fighting games, if you know what you’re doing, its campaign can be finished rather quickly, but it is nonetheless an enjoyable game to try out. (It does include a VS mode as well, if you prefer that!)

Why are there trees in the middle of the road?

Big Run: This game combines strategy and rally racing, with a “straight line race” system like Top Gear. The game is not actually 3D, but the “road” itself snakes left and right, and your input is the speed at which you’re going, how well you can follow the path and avoid going off-road, and avoiding hazards. This race is a trip across nine “tracks” through the African continent, from Tripoli, Libya to Dakar, Senegal. The strategy aspect: Due to road hazards, your car can break down and need repairs on the way! And you have limited budget for this. Hence why, before the very first leg, you pick a sponsor, which comes with an amount of money and, sometimes, spare parts already included. After which, you pick your crew: Up to three teammates, each with their own price. Finally, you can buy more spare parts. Careful though; those are kept in your vehicle, so having more parts slows you down! The last thing? You must finish every leg of the race under a specific amount of time; if you don’t, you are booted out and get a Game Over. Nice mix here, I wasn’t entirely sure at first how to make this work, but I still got about halfway on my first attempt. Not bad for someone figuring out this specific type of racing game, which I have very little experience with!

Game Boy / Game Boy Color

Four lines at once! Oh yeah, the feeling is as
great as it was all those years ago.

Tetris DX: Well, it’s Tetris, you know how that goes. Tetrominoes fall from the top of the screen, and you create full lines of blocks to delete them. Keep going until you run out of space, get a high score, the game gets faster as you level up. Among quality-of-life additions, you can create multiple profiles; each profile keeps track of how many lines you’ve eliminated in total. There are multiple modes here: Classic, first. But also Ultra, a mode in which you must score as many lines as possible in a 3-minute timer, and 40Lines, in which the goal is to make 40 lines, but you can choose to have up to nearly 2/3rds of the screen blocked off. Finally there's VS. Com, where you duel against a CPU, and anytime either player clears multiple lines, those will appear on the opponent’s screen, hindering them. All in all, a very fun game, and as someone who enjoys Tetris, I knew I’d like it.

Quick, shoot while the force field is down!

Gradius: The Interstellar Assault: Added in May 2025, this shmup released originally in January 1992 in North America uses the classic mechanics of Gradius. You play as the Vic Viper, and go through five stages. Before starting play, you can choose how each type of weapon (Missile, Double, or Laser) will upgrade. As you progress and defeat enemies, you can find upgrades and use them to improve the ship. As you collect upgrades, the bar at the bottom of the screen goes up the letters on the bar – late improvements need more upgrades, but are worth it. At 1 upgrade, your ship speeds up, and onwards it can get: Missiles, a double weapon, a Laser weapon, an Option (which follows your ship around and shoots alongside it), and finally a shield (referred to as a force field). You shoot with B and improve the ship with A. As is to be expected from a shmup, this one gets tough and tricky as enemies add up. Some bosses have nasty little tricks, too. To say nothing of asteroid fields! Anyway, yeah, great one. Very enjoyable system that opens the way for tons of strategies. I enjoyed it a lot, got hooked until I could beat it.

Baseball: Again? Yeah. There has been a long gap between my experience playing the NES version and this one, but I think the feeling is pretty much the same. I know the basics, kinda, now I’ve just got to play. And I can confirm I haven’t gotten magically better at sport games. I suuuuck. But! It’s most definitely baseball. With batting and/or pitching, and in the latter case, controlling the teammates on the field to run to the ball wherever it lands. It wasn’t terrible, but it was one of those games where I felt the AI was much better at it than I would ever bother to be. That said, I do prefer the switch of POV when batting. It's more useful than how it worked on the NES­.

Sega Genesis / Mega Drive

This "port" stole an entire dimension from us.

Virtua Fighter 2: The Virtua Fighter series was one of the first 3D fighters. But if you were expecting a 3D game, forget it; the version here is a 2D “demake” of VF2. And by the sound of it, the worst version of the game, with terrible sound design and muddled sprites. Fighters use the A button to punch, B to kick, and Y to defend; and much like games in that genre, combos are possible with button combinations. This franchise prides itself on keeping the characters as balanced as possible. As a result, the eight playable fighters didn’t seem to differ much between each other – but then again, my experience is severely lacking in this genre, so I wouldn’t be able to tell much about the intricacies within. In the Arcade Mode, you battle all eight, one after the other, and then square off against Dural, the final boss. I managed to get to the fifth opponent on my second playthrough; not too shabby for a beginner that just isn’t good with combo-reliant fighting games. It makes me wonder how I would have fared on the superior 3D version…

No, no, you've got it all wrong! Against skeletons,
you use a bludgeoning weapon, not a blade!

Golden Axe: This SEGA classic was released to American arcades in May 1989, to Sega Genesis in January 1990, and joined Nintendo Classics on October 25th, 2021. However, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed it that much. This game is a beat ‘em up. Pick your character among three available, then go save the land of Yuria from a hostile takeover by the villainous Death Adder who wields the titular Golden Axe. Move to the right, defeat enemies, move again, defeat enemies. Classic deal. Your fighter jumps with A, attacks with B, and can use a magic move with Y that will hurt all enemies on the screen, though you need to gather vials to use it; and I think the more vials you have, the more powerful the spell is. They have access to many more moves using button combinations.

The downsides: The character you play moves slowly. They can rush forward if you tap left or right twice, but often the input would not register right and my character wouldn’t run. Classic beat ‘em up issues abound, with enemies trapping the hero between them and punches coming from all sides, and your character’s hits not registering unless they are perfectly level on the up/down plane with the opponent they are trying to attack. Some enemies have steeds that the hero or other enemies can steal; and those steeds are a pain to deal with when used by enemies. Especially the fire-breathing dragons. Yeah, I didn’t have a great time; maybe the sequel will do better, when I get to it.

The N64

Guess I got to review a 3D fighting game regardless!

Killer Instinct Gold: I was sure this one was in the 17+ version of the Switch’s N64 software, but apparently not! This fighting game developed by Rare (and, thus, currently owned by Microsoft) is a home console port of Killer Instinct II, which was a big hit in arcades. It was released on November 25th, 1996. Ten characters to choose from, and the main mode here is the classic Arcade in which the character you choose squares off against the other nine (not counting the unlockable eleventh) in increasingly tough battles. There are plenty of multiplayer options here, such as a Tournament where each player sets their own name and selects their character. This game was meant as Rare’s answer to Mortal Kombat and it shows, as you can even change your preferences in the options to include blood spilling when fighters hit each other. (Though, from what I’ve seen, it IS a fair bit tamer than MK.)

There are six attack buttons, three kicks and three punches, all done through the ABXY buttons and right-side joystick. Combos are plentiful and done using the Joy-Con’s analog stick and the six possible basic moves, and to be fair, some of these fighters have gimmicks that can make them very interesting! Plus, you can learn the combos properly thanks to Training Mode, which lists each character’s moves and the button combination to accomplish them. As stated earlier, I’ve never been good at combo-heavy fighting games. I’m glad this game can serve as someone’s first combo fighter by teaching these moves, but… yeah, all this one (and the many others I’ve played for these articles) has proven is that this type of gameplay isn’t for me. I think I do hold Killer Instinct Gold in higher regard, though.

I might have to fill time some more next week - after that, hopefully, I’ll have some proper, full-length reviews ready. See you soon!