Iiiiiiiiiiiit’s been…
Mario Party 1 and 2 came and went late last year on the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack service, and since then, things have been a bit…slow going. As a reader pointed out to me this past weekend, that prior dual release was on November 2, 2022: 82 days ago as of the time of publication.
There are a few games that are currently announced and will be coming out this year, but we don’t have release dates for any of them. Here’s a refresher.
Here is what’s coming to the Nintendo 64 Switch lineup in 2023:
- 1080 Snowboarding
- Excitebike 64
- Mario Party 3
- Pokemon Stadium
- Pokemon Stadium 2
- Harvest Moon 64 (Japan-only)
So far, that’s all we know about. Naturally, more games could be announced, and in a hypothetical situation, all of these could come out before E3: with a bigger dump arriving in the middle of the year toward the end of 2023. We could even see some sort of upgrade for the Expansion Pack service as a whole, but I wouldn’t count on it.
In the meantime, this slow drip that’s very typical of Nintendo retro re-releases has now become a broken faucet. Since the original launch on October 25, 2021 (has it really been over a year since the Expansion Pack came out?), Nintendo has released 21 games in the west (and 21 games in Japan, since they don’t get Dr. Mario 64 and Pokemon Puzzle League).
Are you cool with it? Or would you like to see more? Or maybe you don’t care because you don’t even subscribe to the Switch Online Expansion Pack for this very reason!
