Super Mario Sunshine Comes To NSO, Along With Two Unreleased Virtual Boy Games

Next month will be pretty eventful for Nintendo Switch Online. They announced today August will be when NSO finally gains Super Mario Sunshine, as well as the two promised Virtual Boy games that never came out in the 90s.

You can already play Super Mario Sunshine on the Switch and Switch 2 if you have the Super Mario 3D All-Stars compilation that came out a few years ago. But that version was an enhanced widescreen edition. This is the original 4:3 standard ratio version, as seen in the trailer…which, for reasons only Nintendo understands, is only available in Japanese. (A global release for this game has been confirmed already.)

You know all about Super Mario Sunshine, don;t you? If you’re among the three who don’t, here’s Nintendo‘s summary:

Mario and his friends arrive on the southern paradise of Delfino Island for a vacation. However, Mario is falsely accused of vandalizing the island with graffiti. Promising to clean up the island, Mario sets out to prove his innocence and find the real culprit in order to recover the sun’s power, “Shine,” which was lost due to the graffiti. The game features water-based action, such as using a “pump” on his back to defeat enemies with water jets and fly through the air.

Super Mario Sunshine will be released to NSO August 13, but one week before then, Nintendo will be doing something no one ever thought they would: release two games that they shelved back in the 1990s. For the VIRTUAL BOY.

Yes, thanks to the goofy full-size replica they sell now, Virtual Boy is part of Nintendo Switch Online and it is now possible to release Zero Racers and D-Hopper, two titles that were completed in 1996 but couldn’t make it because the platform they were built for had already flopped. Zero Racers is a lot like a wireframe F-Zero, while D-Hopper is an action game about a dragon and….no one knew much more than that until now. According to Nintendo:

Prince Dorin of the Sky Kingdom is pursued by the rebellious minister Rexxar and falls deep underground. Rescued by fairies underground, Dorin sets out for the Sky Kingdom while searching for four spirits who have disappeared from the fairy kingdom. He progresses through the stages by jumping and flapping to move across floating platforms in the air and defeating enemies that stand in his way. When he finds the spirits, he can transform into a dragon that can use special abilities.

If anything’s wilder than that, it’s the trailer Nintendo cooked up to hype these releases, which goes above and beyond their usual simple NSO promos. Zero Racers and D-Hopper will release to Nintendo Switch Online August 4.