Nintendo Switch Online is getting more free games later this month. Startropics and Kid Icarus will be joining the host of NES classics you can access for free by signing up for the online service. Both games will be equipped with the usual extras that come with Nintendo Switch Online NES games, like save states and online copies of the manuals.
Kid Icarus is the most known of the two games and stars Pit in his first adventure. He’s tasked with saving Palutena after escaping from Medusa’s prison in the Underworld. You’ll have to use his iconic bow and arrow to take down baddies and find the three treasures needed to defeat Medusa.
Startropics is kind of a weird one. Nintendo almost universally released its first-party NES games in Japan first. The games released here were hand-selected as being fit for Western demographics, which means we lost out on many titles that were never localized. However, the development and release of Startropics took the opposite course. The tale of Mike Jones (no not that one) and his adventure through the isles of the South Seas was created with Western audiences as the focus. The game wasn’t released in Japan during the games original run, and to this day it hasn’t been localized for Japan.
Both Startropics and Kid Icarus were part of the line-up of the NES Classic when it was released in 2016, so if you’re a big Nintendo fan, it’s likely you already have handy access to these games. However, it is nice to be able to take them on the go, and who doesn’t love consolidating their library a little bit.
Kid Icarus and Startropics will be available on the Nintendo Switch Online app on March 13, 2019. Nintendo continues to bring the NES’s best to the Switch, but there’s no word yet on games from any other system releasing. Hopefully, we’ll start getting some post-8-bit goodies sometime soon.
