You get what you pay for, it's really silly to expect it to have the same level of quality and content as Sony and MS offerings at a third of the price.

It's the worst out of the big three so yeah it's pretty bad. It's far from parity with the others and now they're gonna charge for it. They gotta start somewhere though.

The 3G model yes. Can I take my non 3G model to the park and use online voice chat?

I am talking about local player where everyone is in the same room. Didn't they sell the Switch as being able to locally connect to other switches without the need for internet? i.e. local multiplayer over wireless lan

Charging for cloud saves without an alternate way to back-up your save data is a poor move, whichever way I look at it. If there was a way to back-up saves to USB or microSD then sure, charge away. But locking the only save back-up functionality behind a paywall is poor form.

I was most interested in Nintendo offering a subscription service for their retro games, but given I've played (several times) the NES games I'm interested in, I'm not particularly interested in this NES selection. I also think what we're looking at here is a stand-alone app - 'Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online' seems to be the branding for it, and Nintendo's press response about Virtual Console mentioned the NES selection separately from eShop. I wouldn't be surprised if you end up with an app that functions similarly to the NES Mini's front-end.

However, the wider ramifications of this suggest to me that when Nintendo want to add a new system to the subscription, it's going to be a new app so we'll have 'SNES - Nintendo Switch Online' and 'N64/GBA (etc) Nintendo Switch Online' at some point in the future. I'd be more interested in those, and I'd really like to see Nintendo give people an option to buy the games they want to keep. Ultimately I don't see Nintendo allowing people access to multiple collections of games for just $20 per year. Given the value they place on their back catalogue and intellectual property, I suspect that, in future, any new systems will bump up the cost of your Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Not by much - maybe an additional $5 - but access to NES, SNES, N64, GB, GBA games plus online play, cloud saves etc seems too generous to me.

That being said, I'd pay more for a wider selection of games from different systems.

So we're gonna give Nintendo a pass for bringing an online service and charging us with less features than the Wii online service 

Now if they said NES SNES GC N64 WII AND WIIU I'd pay 60 bucks for that but for only nes games I can emulate on my PC no thanks

Maybe next gen with the Switch 2, it ll be better, and more like Xbox or Playstation's.... for now enjoy those NES games.

Tbh to me it sounds like Nintendo want to Charge its consumers, without actually offering much of anything for it.
And for some reason tons of people are damage controlling this.

Exactly they're not offering much at all to be charging anything and this is they're 3rd chance and they still cant get it right Sony wasn't this bad it took them 2 chances 

I'm not sure what online capabilities will add to SMB3. The game is a single player experience. Even the two player mode is each player taking turns.

A few questions:

• will the NES games be playable offline or do they need an online connection in single player (like Super Mario Run)?
• will the NES games stay active after the subscription ends (like 360 games in the GwG-sub)?
• is only the upload of cloud saves subscription based? (so can I download cloud saves after the subscription ends?)
• will cloud saves stay on the servers after the subscription runs out? (so can I download cloud saves with renewing the subscription after a pause?)