During the marketing for the Switch 2, one of the most talked about aspects (perhaps because there was so little else to talk about) was the potential that the new Joy-Con 2s could be used as mice. Post-launch, there’s been almost no reason to bother. It hasn’t featured as a necessary control option in either of Nintendo’s first-party exclusives, relegated to the belated release of next month’s Drag x Drive. But wait! The latest update to the Switch Online archive of older Nintendo games has added the SNES product, Mario Paint, and finally the Joy-Con 2 makes sense.
1992’s Mario Paint was released for the SNES, offering a suite of graphics, animation and music tools, all designed to be used with the Super NES Mouse peripheral that came with the app. And it was enormously popular! It’s considered one of the SNES’s most successful “games,” selling over 2.3 million copies, despite the hefty price
Mario Paint was fairly pivotal for the existence of Homestar Runner, the very first cartoon created in it, and then the medium returned to regularly by the site. It was also the springboard for so many Nintendo creation tools, including Super Mario Maker. But the odd thing is, despite how it could have been such a good fit for the Wii, the Wii U, and the various forms of the DS, it never saw a re-release on any of those platforms.
But now, in a surprise move, Nintendo has added Mario Paint to the Switch Online subscription collection. And, yes, it’s been designed to work with the Joy-Con 2 as a mouse. Alongside this, the product’s soundtrack has been added to the Nintendo Music app.
And the retro-mouse antics don’t stop there. As Nintendo Everything spotted Nintendo has also just added mouse support to Mario Super Picross and Genesis strategy game Nobunaga’s Ambition.
You also don’t need a Switch 2 to take advantage of this. Plug a USB mouse into your original Switch, and you can also use this to interact with Mario Paint. But I can attest that the Joy-Con controls work, if a little painfully slowly, as proven by the masterpiece atop this article.
You’ll need a Nintendo Switch Online subscription to access this, but at the cheaper tier given it’s a SNES game. I can’t wait to see people using this to create animations once again.
Meanwhile, while researching this article, I found a Reddit thread from a year ago discussing SNES pricing which included the following Mario Paint anecdote that I feel compelled to share:
when Mario paint came out for SNES I rented it from blockbuster and created a nasty NSFW picture and saved it and returned it.
Next time I went my account at blockbuster was suspended. I questioned it and they said I created a XXX picture. I said “I didn’t even have time to use it” so they unlocked it and gave me a $10 credit on my account.
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