Super Mario 3D All Stars came out on the Switch to celebrate 35 years of the franchise. It’s only available for purchase until March 21st 2021 for some reason I haven’t been able to find.
The package contains Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy. Hackers have found that the first two are simply ROMs emulated on the Switch, and the last one is a port – but not a remaster or new edition, just a simple port.
It’s… very underwhelming, and we’ve come to accept that this is how Nintendo operates. Remember when they sold NES and SNES minis for 100$ (while stoking fake shortages) which was just an emulator in a small package.
Mario 64 especially is stuck at 30FPS and in 4:3, when mod hackers were able to make it run in 16:9 resolution. Most emulators also offer graphics options; Dolphin for example, the best emulator for Gamecube and Wii, can easily run games at 3x their native resolution which makes them probably as pretty
Still, I bought it. I never played Sunshine or Galaxy in my youth and this is cheaper than buying a GBC or Wii and I don’t like playing these types of games on emulators (especially Galaxy which is made for motion control).
To counteract all this sick capitalism, here’s a trick to get cheaper games for the Switch. If you live in Europe or Asia, or rather if you have access to a credit card that’s based on either continent, you can get pretty good deals on eshop games and that’s what I did there – use something like www.esho.pw to compare prices. For Europe, that’s usually South Africa, especially for this next trick.
Nintendo offers vouchers for two games for all their stores outside of the American continent, from what I understand, and these vouchers can be redeemed on a selection of games published by Nintendo. A unit of two vouchers (they come in pairs) cost 1559 ZAR (South African Rand), or 80€. You also need a nintendo online subscription, which is about 2.5€ in South Africa. That means a Nintendo game that normally costs 58€ in France, 57 in SA and 50 in Russia only costs 41.5€ when using vouchers. Just make sure you disable automatic renewal for your online subscription, though it’s plenty inexpensive.
You also accumulate Gold points when buying vouchers which, if you buy enough, can get you another Triple A game for free or very cheap. Gold points however don’t transfer between countries but stay on your account for 365 days.
I recommend making an account on your Switch just for buying stuff, set its country to South Africa when making it (or go on accounts.nintendo.com). I’ve been doing this for years and evidently Nintendo knows it, since it’s only last year that they upped the prices slightly for their games in SA.
This is the kind of game I don’t even feel slightly bad about pirating, since I own all of the games in the collection anyway…but for some reason I still want a physical copy.
You can even easily emulate all of them with Dolphin and any N64 emulator for Mario 64. Unfortunately analog consoles look like crap on LCD screens and your original copies of 64, Sunshine and Galaxy will look blurry, unless you have a CRT screen.
Mario Galaxy works on any controller on an emulator, you just have to remap the wiimote shake that you use to attack in the original game. IIRC I mapped Wiimote y+ on the left trigger so that whenever I press it, the game thinks I’m shaking the wiimote at the screen.
I haven’t tried the collection yet actually because my second game with the vouchers was Paper Mario and that one is cool. Much better than the 3DS Paper Mario at least.
Oh yeah, like 90 percent of my gaming is on emulators, even though I do have CRTs and original hardware lol
