I guess, the problem I have with the Nintendo Switch 2 goes deeper than price and baked-in analytics. This is the first console since the Super NES not to include the voice of Charles Martinet. Mario is still with us, but Charles is not, and that's ruined everything for me. I can't even watch longplays of anything newer than Super Mario Odyssey. I thought the image of Mario with the voice of Chris Pratt coming out of it was discordant to me, but seeing Mario running and jumping across the screen as he's always done, only with Kevin Afghani's voice coming out, fills me with a remarkable melancholy that I never had the words for until now. It's the same, but different; like someone took away all my furniture and replaced it with replicas of everything.
As though that weren't bad enough, they jettisoned Rareware's Donkey Kong. From 1994 until 2025, Donkey Kong was completely unchanged. They replaced Grant Kirkhope with a different voice actor; okay, I can understand that. Rareware got bought by Microsoft and Grant never recorded new clips for DK after DK64. But to completely redesign Donkey Kong feels like they slammed the door on the Super NES and welded it shut. Everything is different now.
Even though I heap all this criticism onto Nintendo as a corporate feudal entity, charging double subscription fees for access to old games, I'm very grateful for Nintendo Classics. The execution might be late-capitalist greed, but it's keeping the old games alive, even though their consoles have been extinct in the wild for decades. When I was a kid, I balked at the NES and Atari 7800, wondering who could possibly find those blocky old graphics any fun at all. I passed summary judgement on them because I couldn't play them myself. I could look back and feel sorry for people in the past not having the wondrous technology I had access to myself. With Nintendo Classics, even though it's a terribly stunted selection of games from back then, no one has to wonder what games were like before the Switch series. Mario might look different, Donkey Kong might too, but since your dad is already spending XYZ money on subscription fees to Nintendo Switch Online, you can still see how my Mario looked, how my Luigi sounded, how I must have felt playing my games when they were new.
That having been said, hearing Mario Kart World's acoustic arrangement of the Super Mario Land 2 athletic theme last night made me feel very old. I heard that song come out of the Game Boy wave banks and thought it was the best thing ever. I watched a longplay of DKC2: Diddy's Kongquest last week and thought about how that game provided the soundtrack to Christmas morning 1995 and Hanukkah 5755 in hundreds of thousands of houses and flats across the country. Now Donkey Kong is different, Diddy and Dixie are nothing but NPC's, and the amazing high-colour sprites have been leapfrogged by GPU's that no one in industry back in the '90s could ever have imagined. It just points to the fact that my games are now old and obsolete, and I'm starting to feel that way myself. I sit here making recommendation lists full of games you can't find anymore because Nintendo DMCA'd all the websites where you could find them and are never going to be released on Classics no matter how long you hold your breath. Depression stopped me continuing my Nintendo obsession, money stopped me resuming it, so here I sit on my 11th birthday in 2002, a decade and change before most of my followers were born, with my N64, GameCube, and Super NES hyperfixation, recommending games that are so far behind the curve that no one would ever want to play them.