Switch Online didn’t exactly light the world
on fire when it launched, paywalling a previously free feature while tossing a meager selection
of NES games at the suckers who bought in. Years later it still offers no online improvements,
but the library of games has expanded enough that $20 a year is reasonable for what you’re
getting. The Expansion Pack faceplanted even harder
with just 9 N64 games wrung through some of the worst emulation I’ve ever seen on modern
hardware. It was rightfully mocked by most corners of
the internet, but after more than a year of updates it also deserves a second look. I don’t do these videos just for my sick
kicks; the goal is to add to the chorus asking for better services, and if Nintendo listens
and makes positive changes then that should be encouraged. Ocarina of Time was the low point of the original
launch but now most of its issues are fixed; the fog is restored, the dark link room works,
and alpha textures seem to apply correctly now. That last one was a problem on every previous
system, so the fact that it’s finally been addressed is noteworthy. Latency has been improved but still falls
behind my results from the Wii Virtual Console and Project64. After subtracting the lag of my monitor, the
average drop since launch was about 16 milliseconds, and sometimes up to 25 in Zelda. Oddly, Sin and Punishment was the only game
whose result didn’t change at all. I never considered this to be a dealbreaker,
but it is good to see the rendering delay improve. Majora’s Mask benefitted from the updates
and seems to avoid most of the issues that plagued Ocarina of Time. A few objects and textures display incorrectly
but nothing stands out as particularly bad. Some alpha effects don’t look bright enough
but it may have to do with seizure prevention rather than a bug. The same can be seen with fire in Ocarina
of Time, which was left unchanged when the other graphics issues were fixed. There’s a fix for the giants cutscene that
adds slowdown in order to keep the length equal to real hardware, which struggled to
render this sequence. As far as I’m aware, this improvement isn’t
available on PC. There, the slowdown won’t happen, so the
scene ends before the music is finished. I’ve been using emulators for so long that
I had forgotten this wasn’t how it was to begin with. Both Zeldas now seem to be OK versions to
play. The effect for Inviso in Yoshi’s Story was
finally fixed with the Goldeneye update. It took over a year, but it’s done. The minor seams in Star Fox cutscenes are
also gone. For these games, it can safely be said that
the emulation is the best Nintendo has ever offered; that should be a low bar to clear,
but after the Wii U and Switch seemed to just keep going downward the turnaround here is
substantial. Not everything is patched, though- there are
still pervasive tiling issues that cause seams and misalignments on most 2D assets. Even something as simple as the “dawn of”
screens in Majora show the split pretty clearly. A lot of effects still aren’t being rendered
correctly. New games can still show up with bugs as bad
as the launch ones had, like Kirby getting permanently frozen after taking a single hit. There’s still no controller pak support,
and it’s fairly surprising that they’ve left save systems and game features broken
for this long. Dataminers found references to the controller
pak in the code right from the start, so I’m not sure what’s holding it up. Even swapping the paks manually in the pop-up
menu would be an acceptable solution. The controls are also still a shitshow. You’re still expected to use ZR to mode
shift the face buttons into C buttons, with no option to disable that and map the C buttons
freely. Unless you like spinning in circles, left
C is useless without right C, making it baffling that it gets the Y mapping in almost every
game… what do they expect you to do with this button? The only way to get a decent scheme in some
games is to buy the N64 pad, which is perpetually out of stock. The emulation may be overall better than the
Wii U, but in this one regard it’s a big step backward. The system level controls are not a solution
to this. Each emulation app needs its own input menu,
especially the N64 app. Users can’t be expected to completely bork
their controller for modern games every time they want to revisit a retro title. If Nintendo does want to rely on system level
mapping, the bare minimum they need to do is make profiles faster to access or allow
users to assign a profile to an app from its menu. The service has definitely improved, but it
still isn’t where it should be. It seems like rather than getting better at
a core level, individual games have just benefitted from a long drip feed of bugfixes. There isn’t enough internal testing being
done and it’s not until a game goes up that problems are found and brought to Nintendo’s
attention. From there, it’s a matter of months or even
years before they address them. It’s still a low priority project without
enough resources behind it to justify the premium price. What does make an argument in the premium
tier’s favor is Goldeneye, which I never expected to see released again. It was rumored that the high price of the
expansion pack was for the sake of getting difficult to license games onto the service,
and if so then it’s hard to argue with the results in this case. There are issues with this release but first
I’ll say that it’s fine. Nothing is as bad as what was seen in the
first batch of games, and nothing stopped me from having a lot of fun replaying the
entire thing. It was kind of heartwarming to see everyone
online posting about playing Goldeneye again, revisiting a simpler time where you could
hose a fleeing Sean Bean down with a hail of uzi fire- and get nary a single reaction
out of his cardboard box face. A new generation of players can get acquainted
with the most unsatisfying weapon ever, a gun so bad not even triple wielding would
save it. Klobb up all you want, buddy, it’s not gonna
do shit. The game aged terribly but in a way that’s
a lot of fun to experience; the jank is loaded with potential for comedy. Characters go flying like rockets, losers
are slapped, office chairs explode, and innocent civilians run straight into tank treads and
squash themselves into pudding. The developers knew what the game was and
had fun with its absurdity while still taking the quality seriously. But underneath the core game design unironically
holds up. The objective based difficulty system is still
the best incentive to play on hard mode that I’ve ever seen a game offer, since you don’t
experience the full levels otherwise. The level designs run a full gamut from linear
rail shooting to wide open free exploration. The developers experimented with every gameplay
variation the hardware could handle and left few stones unturned. The multiplayer is really simple and quaint
but there are enough mode combinations to keep you entertained for hours. It’s surprising how little the appeal of
it has faded in the face of how ancient it feels nowadays. The fact that this game is accessible again
is a great win for Nintendo, and nothing I say should undercut that... But the quality is disappointing. The controls will be a big obstacle for the
newcomers that will finally get their hands on this game. The aim and and fire buttons are not symmetrical
due to ZR being used for the mode shift, and having to hold that shift in order to strafe
is just awful. The N64 controller is the only way to perform
strafe running with ease, which is important for speedrunning cheat unlocks, but even that
will still probably feel really weird to new players. The internet has settled on the best scheme
being 1.2 solitaire with the analog sticks and Z buttons reversed in the system settings. This gets you modern dual analog that feels
great without unbalancing the difficulty, but again, the setup is complicated due to
the lack of mapping within the app. There are some neat touches, like support
for the game’s built-in 16:9 mode that automatically reverts to 4:3 in menus to avoid a stretched
UI. Mostly though the presentation is really ugly,
with rampant aliasing and polygon seams. The Xbox version devs claimed that all their
bugs are accurate to real hardware, and in some cases that seems true. The seams are in the original game, but they
end up much more noticeable in these new versions. This is a general problem extending to other
games on the service as well. Even when using low level plugins, there are
bad mappings and depth issues, but on Switch the glitches are easier to trigger and spot
than they should be. Muzzle flashes are weaker than the original,
but that’s likely another safety measure and not a bug. Switch doesn’t emulate N64 mipmapping, which
could be considered an enhancement because the original LOD was really aggressive and
blurry from any distance. The LOD is partially broken, though- there’s
a model loading glitch that prevents destroyed objects from degrading. The models should darken with each shot and
finally explode, leaving a scrap of debris behind. Instead, blown turrets are often fully intact,
which creates confusion about which are safe and which are still active. The statue chopper has a similar bug that
displays the intact model (with spinning blades and all) at a distance even after it’s exploded. I couldn’t reproduce any of this in the
ParaLLEl plugin, these bugs seem new. The bad texture filtering leads to characters
being cut off on one side and wrapped to the other, creating seams that aren’t present
in LLE. ParaLLEl isn’t a fair comparison since it’s
beyond the capabilities of the Switch, but GlideN64 also avoids most texture issues. There is still a cutoff on some characters,
but it’s a marked improvement over Switch. Performance can be choppy and the caverns
level specifically has some real framerate issues; after playing I noticed a lot of other
reports of this online, so it seems to be consistently bad. Playing on GlideN64 is much smoother thanks
to the unlocked framerate allowing for 60fps, while Switch is capped to 30. And if you want to push the enhancements,
1964 offers a keyboard and mouse hack with standard WASD controls. Some people think it breaks the difficulty,
but you can crank 007 mode as high as you want to compensate. And then there’s the Xbox Live Arcade remaster,
now seemingly confirmed to forever remain in Microsoft’s trash bin. Emulating a patched up version of the leak
gives you 60fps and dual analog by default, but it has a few remaining audio bugs. The graphics upgrade is a matter of taste;
I think the update looks nice, but you lose Bean, you lose Brosnan, and you lose Boris. It can toggled back to 64 with a button press
any time, though. The Wii remake isn’t worth mentioning since
it’s a different game. I still did, and it wasted everyone’s time. So there are a lot of options and Switch is
one of the weaker ones, with notably worse accuracy, performance and enhancements than
PC. Again, it’s fine, but they could have done
better for such a high profile release. But I’m forgetting online play! Switch Online lets you do the classic splitscreen
multiplayer with friends around the world! And this is what that looks like: It was hard to find anyone to play with because
the feature is restricted to friends only, and no one I know has the Expansion Pack. The few people I did find on Discord couldn’t
connect well and that led to a jank shitshow spectacular. I’ve seen videos of this before, but it’s
another thing to behold its glory in person. What could be a great asset to Switch is undone
by the fact that it’s so picky about whose internet will work, and you can’t matchmake
with a wider pool of strangers to find ones with acceptable pings. The setup is also confusing, and I had to
check a guide to figure out that “play while you wait” is how you create a room from
which you can send invites. I’m not saying this mode has no value, or
that you can’t get fair connections with the right people, or even that it wasn’t
still fun at its absolute worst. I am saying that it’s too unreliable and
backwards to be the selling point that it should be. As always, there’s competition here from
the fan community, which rebuilt multiplayer mode in the Source engine years ago. It might not have that authentic, low poly
charm, but it doesn’t drop to four frames per second and screech robot atrocities into
your ears when a friend connects, so it’s a trade-off. Complaints aside, I appreciate that Nintendo
seems to have tried here. Negotiating this release was not an easy thing
to do, and I want to say that it bodes well for getting more games on the service. …Except that the NES and SNES apps haven’t
been updated since July 2022. Those platforms have been mostly wrapped up
for a while now. Regardless, there’s a lot to play for $20,
and the sudden addition of the Game Boy bolsters this tier as a pretty fair deal. The expansion pack is still struggling. Genesis games continue to trickle in, but
that only has so much appeal when you can buy and own a bundle with many more games
on Steam for half the price of renting them on Switch. Game Boy Advance certainly moves things in
the right direction, but the starting library is extremely small. There is no point in doing the drip feed thing
anymore, just upload the ROMs. The emulation at least looks really sharp
so far, with a scanline filter that’s much better than the blur option from Wii U. Let’s see if these additions are enough
to reverse the big downward staircase graph of releases. Excluding the SP remixes, Switch currently
has 191 games. Including all upcoming games, the number climbs
to 206. It’s possible that Switch could overtake
the Wii U’s 311 before the generation is over. That system was an abject flop, yet still
added most systems within its first three years; the Switch is one of their most profitable
ever, and is only receiving these platforms at year six. Their waning enthusiasm for these libraries
is plain to see. The upside is they’ve at least exceeded
the Wii and Wii U counts for N64, but there isn’t much track left ahead… aside from
Perfect Dark and Smash Bros there aren’t many heavy hitters to boost the pack with. I still don’t think this is worth $50, and
the only thing that could get me there is a GameCube app. Knowing Nintendo though, they would probably
make that an $80 tier. There is some value on the DLC side, and if
you happen to own Mario Kart, Animal Crossing and Splatoon 2 then you could save $20 by
using the Expansion Pack rather than buying all DLC outright. But that’s assuming you play everything
within one year; spread across even just two years, you’re now paying $30 more to own
absolutely nothing- the value completely evaporates. And the fact that new DLC already isn’t
being included makes this deal even weaker. It’s not too exciting next to something
like Gamepass, which not only has many more titles but newer AAA ones, and gives you a
cheaper path to ownership if you want to keep something. The price is higher, but the value is much
easier to see. There’s also the creeping effect of more
monetization in games themselves as services like this gain traction. The kind of items that should be free unlocks
get shifted behind paywalls, with even the already paywalled Online icons getting a double-paywalled
N64 batch. Nintendo also likes to force timed exclusivity
so that any lapse in membership results in missed content. So, it still sucks but far less than
it did at launch. It’s not a slap in the face anymore. They’ve reached that “adequate” level
of quality for most games, where it’s about as good as you can expect a commercial emulator
to be. The goal posts have moved, though, and the
old “adequate” isn’t so adequate now. I’ve droned on about this so many times
that I’m bored of it, but fans are doing better with retro games now than they ever
have. Even lowly N64 emulators are getting a ray
tracing plugin with 60fps interpolation, and a long list of games are in the process of
being decompiled and ported to PC. This is a relatively new development but the
progress has been rapid. A Link to the Past just went public as I was
editing this. Perfect Dark is decompiled and Goldeneye is
in progress, meaning that ports with real online play and new content aren’t far off. Mario64 and Ocarina of Time have been out
for a while, both offering dramatic enhancements to performance and controls. This is the next generation of game preservation-
radically improving quality and ease of use by leaving emulators and their limitations
behind. Meanwhile Nintendo is still fucking around
trying to get basic emulation right, backsliding with every system like Sisyphus forever pushing
a boulder uphill only to drop it. You can have a discussion about whether it’s
fair to hold them to the standards fans are setting- no one is expecting or asking for
transistor accurate apps with ray tracing and high framerates. The point of this video is that all this great
fan software does exist, and the comparison doesn’t flatter a mediocre, buggy, vanilla
emulation service like this. Switch Online rakes in money regardless, but
I do wonder how many more generations they can go without doing the bare minimum, which
to me should be GlideN64 level accuracy now. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned ho who doesn’t
know shit about nothing, but that’s my one-year update on the service. Nintendo deserves credit for improving, and
they took a few good steps forward… but in the same timeframe that fan developers
leapt by miles, so the gap only widened. I’ll see you again in 2028, when Switch
2 gets a version of Ocarina of Time that’s nothing but fog. James Bond! James Bond! James Bond will kill you! He gives no fucks! James Bond will love you! 'Cause he is a total stud in bed! Here comes James Bond and he's fuckin' coming to kill you Here comes James Bond and he's fuckin' coming to shag you The man with the gun and the mysterious look in his eyes If you don't know who he is then he is James Bond! He's James Bond!
