Four more Game Boy games, including a Kirby puzzler, have been added to Nintendo Switch Online
Kirby’s Star Stacker and Survival Kids lead this month’s selection
Nintendo has added four new Game Boy games to its Nintendo Switch Online retro game library.
Kirby’s Star Stacker, Survival Kids, Gradius: The Interstellar Assault and The Sword of Hope are all available to play on the service now.
Kirby’s Star Stacker is a Tetris-like block-dropping puzzle game featuring a selection of Kirby characters. Players drop two-block shapes consisting of the animal helpers from Kirby’s Dream Land 2, with the aim being to drop them between Star Blocks to make them disappear.
Survival Kids (known as Stranded Kids in Europe) was the first game in what would become the Lost in Blue series, and told the story of a young boy called Ken and a young girl called Mery who are washed ashore a desert island. Armed with only a knife, players have to find food, drink and other items to survive.
The latest game in the Survival Kids series will be released on Switch 2 on launch day, so the re-release of the Game Boy original is presumably an attempt to raise awareness of the series.
Gradius: The Interstellar Assault, which was released as Nemesis II in Japan and Europe, is a spin-off of Konami‘s shoot ’em up series. It uses the same power-up ‘banking’ system from the main series, where players collect generic orbs to fill a meter at the bottom of the screen, then claim them when it reaches the power-up they want.
Finally, The Sword of Hope is a Kemco RPG which is a cross between a point-and-click adventure and a dungeon crawler. The game follows Prince Theo as he tries to find that keys that will lead him to the Sword of Hope, which is the only weapon that can defeat the possessed, cursed king.
The addition of these four titles brings the total number of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games available on Switch Online to 39 in the west. Recent additions have included the Donkey Kong Land trilogy, Tetris DX, the 1994 Donkey Kong reboot and Mario’s Picross.
NES, SNES, Game Boy and Game Boy Colour games are available as part of the standard Switch Online subscription, which costs £3.49/€3.99/$3.99 for a one-month membership, £6.99/€7.99/$7.99 for a three-month membership, and £17.99/€19.99/$19.99 for a 12-month membership.
Switch Online’s Expansion Pack add-on, which is needed to play Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance and Sega Mega Drive / Genesis games, costs $49.99 / £34.99 / €39.99 per year.
