New roms added to Nintendo Switch Online today, bringing you all the joy and fun of digging through a clearance bin. This time around, we've got Operation Logic Bomb, Wild Guns, Panel de Pon, and Rygar. And here's the announcement video:
12k likes to 7.3k dislikes at the moment. The comments are thankfully
mostly people going "what the fuck Nintendo where is Earthbound/Donkey Kong Country/literally anything on N64 or Gamecube, why are we getting fucking Rygar?".
Panel de Pon is especially a weird one, considering it's the Japanese version of Tetris Attack. Tetris Attack was the first game in what would go on to be Nintendo's
Puzzle League series, and featured Yoshi's Island characters as mascots, making up a nice theme for the game. The Japanese version was released with its own original characters, a bunch of fairies that never showed up anywhere else of note. So I figure the fairy theme was considered unpalatable for Americans back in the 90's, and thus came the Yoshi theme.
But afterwards, you never heard the game referred to as "Tetris Attack" in any newer releases, since they just named it that as a tie-in with the Tetris brand. But I guess Nintendo didn't wanna relicense the Tetris name, so they just skirted it and released Panel de Pon? That's... dumb. Especially since the Yoshi-themed one
did get a Japanese release:
Or they could have just hacked out the "Tetris" name and just renamed it to "Yoshi's Puzzle League". Instead, we got the original Japanese version, complete with untranslated menus. Great, thanks Nintendo.
They've already had an awkward enough relationship with their own Puzzle League series, with each game having an identity crisis of sorts. Firstly was Tetris Attack, a game where they had no confidence in the graphics or even the title. Then came Pokemon Puzzle League on N64, a game that was literally the same but tied into the Pokemon franchise. Then Dr. Mario & Puzzle League on GBA, a two-pack released at a time when the GBA was on its last legs, with... no theme whatsoever. Seriously, here's a screenshot:
It's really that bare bones.
Afterwards came Planet Puzzle League, a pretty good version for the DS that used the stylus and went along with that brief fad Lumines started where classic & puzzle games went all techno-ey
(see also: Space Invaders Extreme; Pac-Man Championship Edition; Meteos; Every Extend Extra). And then... that's it, I guess? There was a stripped-down version of the DS game as a download on the DSi & 3DS, and Wikipedia says there was a bonus game of it in Animal Crossing New Leaf. I guess Nintendo just never knew what to do with the franchise, despite how they could have just slapped a bunch of Nintendo characters all over it over and over and
over and
over like they do with everything, along the lines of Tetris DS (or, you know, Tetris Attack).
But it's been 13 years since the last time they put any measurable level of ass into a version of Puzzle League, and now we can play an old-ass Japanese SNES version of it where they couldn't even be bothered to translate the already-in-English-but-written-in-Katakana menus.