Nintendo Switch Online members are getting another dose of classic Mario and their first helping of Kirby next Wednesday.
Super Mario Bros. 2 and Kirby’s Adventure, which came out on NES in 1988 and 1993 respectively, are joining the library you get as part of Switch’s $20-a-year subscription service, Nintendo said Tuesday.
For those counting, this will bring the service’s NES library to 33. Nintendo adds more each month.
You might notice that Super Mario Bros. 2 is quite different from other games in the series, with different gameplay mechanics, four playable characters and an unusual set of enemies. That’s because it wasn’t originally a Mario game.
It was released in Japan as Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic, while a much harder version of Super Mario Bros. came out there under the name Super Mario Bros. 2.
Nintendo decided the latter was too similar to the original game, so it added Mario elements to Doki Doki Panic and released it outside Japan as a sequel. This version of the game was later brought to Japan as Super Mario USA, while the original Japanese sequel came out worldwide under the name Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels (which will probably come to Switch Online sometime).
The history of Kirby’s Adventure is a bit more straightforward. It’s the second game in the Kirby series (after Kirby’s Dream Land on Game Boy), the first to depict him in pink and the debut of his copy powers, which he puts to good use in the Smash Bros. series.
However, Japanese subscribers are once again getting a better deal with a third game. In addition to Super Mario USA and Kirby’s Adventure, they’ll be able to play sumo wrestling game Tsuppari Oozumou, which translates as ‘sumo shove’ and was released by Tecmo in 1987.
Last month, we got a hint that Switch Online’s library of classic games might hit the next retro generation after someone who claims to have looked into the code said there were hints of 22 SNES games in the NES Online code strings.