Nintendo is adding three more Game Boy games to its Game Boy – Nintendo Classics app on Switch and Switch 2 on October 27: the Shigeru Miyamoto-produced puzzler Mole Mania, Jaleco's ghost-possession platformer Avenging Spirit, and HAL Laboratory's pinball game Revenge of the 'Gator. Nintendo of America and Nintendo Japan both announced the batch with short trailers, and all three will be playable by Nintendo Switch Online members at no extra cost from Monday.
What's arriving on October 27
It is a deliberately mixed trio. One is a first-party puzzle game that was overshadowed in its day, one is a licensed action game from a third-party publisher, and one is an early HAL Laboratory project from before the studio was known for Kirby. None of them are household names, which is exactly what makes them worth a look on a subscription service: there is no cost to trying a game you may have walked past on a shop shelf in the early 1990s.
As with the rest of the Game Boy library on Nintendo Classics, the games run through Nintendo's own emulation app, which supports suspend points and rewind, so the punishing difficulty that some of these cartridges were known for is a lot easier to live with today.
Mole Mania: Miyamoto's two-layer puzzle game
Mole Mania is the headline addition. It was released in Japan in 1996 and in the West in 1997, very late in the original Game Boy's life, with Shigeru Miyamoto as producer. You play as Muddy, a mole whose wife and seven children have been kidnapped by a farmer named Jinbe, and you dig your way through a series of mazes to get them back.
The hook is that every stage exists on two layers. Above ground, boulders, barrels and enemies block your path; below ground, you can tunnel freely and pop back up somewhere else. Each puzzle is about moving objects across both layers so you can push a heavy iron ball through a gate to open the way forward. It plays like a cousin of the box-pushing puzzles in Nintendo's own Zelda dungeons, stretched into a whole game, and it was one of the cartridges built to show off the Super Game Boy, with a custom border and colour palette when played on a Super Nintendo.
Mole Mania also had a two-player versus mode over the Game Boy link cable. Nintendo's Classics app supports local and online play on its Game Boy titles that originally used the cable, so that mode has a chance at a second life too.
Avenging Spirit: play as a ghost who borrows bodies
Avenging Spirit was published by Jaleco and first appeared in Japan in 1991 under the name Phantasm, before reaching North America the following year. It opens with the hero already dead, shot down by a crime syndicate that has also kidnapped his girlfriend. Her father, a scientist who studies the paranormal, brings him back as a spirit so he can finish the job.
As a ghost you are fragile, but you can possess almost any enemy on screen and take over their body and abilities, from gun-toting gangsters to ninjas and stranger creatures. Each host has its own health bar and attack, and when one is about to die you can bail out and jump into the next. It is an unusually clever idea for a 1991 handheld game, and the Japanese box art Nintendo showed alongside the announcement puts that whole cast of possessable characters front and centre.
Revenge of the 'Gator: HAL Laboratory's pinball before Kirby
Revenge of the 'Gator was developed by HAL Laboratory and released in Japan in 1989, a few months after the Game Boy itself, then in the West in 1990. Its Japanese title translates roughly as Pinball: The Great 66-Alligator Parade, and alligators are the whole theme: they line the table, snap at your ball and can carry it off into bonus stages.
It is one of the earliest pinball games on the system, and it came from the same studio that would later make Kirby's Pinball Land for Game Boy in 1993. It also supports two players head-to-head, competing for the higher score on the same table.
How to play
All three games will appear in the Game Boy – Nintendo Classics app from October 27. You will need an active Nintendo Switch Online membership to access the app, and the games work on both the original Switch and Switch 2.
If you only try one, make it Mole Mania. It is the one with Miyamoto's name on it, and its above-and-below puzzle design still feels distinctive nearly 30 years later.
