Super Star, Dream Land 3, and Dream Course
Nintendo just added three new Kirby SP games to the Switch Online service: building upon the existing original versions that already existed on Switch. As a reminder, “SP” versions are modified editions of Switch Online NES or SNES games that essentially have a “cheat/unlock” save out of the box. That’s really it.
Breaking this down, here’s what the Switch Online Kirby SP games do:
- Kirby Super Star SP: You get Revenge of Meta Knight mode access immediately
- Kirby’s Dream Land 3 SP: An easier difficulty/extras are available
- Kirby’s Dream Course SP: Extras unlocked, including more multiplayer stages (this is probably the most useful of the three)
SP versions started off as a cute little flight of fancy bonus, but at this point people are asking for an option to hide them entirely from the interface: which has become more unwieldy and bloated as more games have been added. Initially “SP” seemed like something special, like maybe an official ROM hack or a different edition of a classic game: but they turned out to just be, by and large, save-doctored retreads.
Another issue is that Nintendo potentially sees these as “updates,” which slows down future games from becoming part of the service sooner. It’s tough to tell what the actual cadence of games is for the Switch Online service by any metric, as “slow” generally sums it up: from the launch of the NES service all the way to the current era of Nintendo 64 and Genesis.
