Nintendo Switch Online

I played some Super Mario Bros. 3 online with a colleague, using voice chat through the Nintendo Switch Online smartphone app. While setting up the voice chat was unwieldy because of the need to balance my phone's chat audio with the Switch itself, actually setting up a two-player NES game online was as easy as opening the game in online mode and waiting until my colleague saw it pop up on his Switch.

You cannot talk to other players online through your Switch. Instead, you need to download the Nintendo Switch Online app for Android and iOS and use your smartphone for voice chat.

For compatible games, you can upload your save data to Nintendo's servers so that you can restore your saves if your files get corrupted or your system gets stolen. You can also transfer your saves to a new system.

Nintendo Switch Online offers access to the Nintendo Entertainment System - Nintendo Switch Online app on the Switch. It's a Netflix-like library of classic video games and the closest thing the Switch has to a first-party Virtual Console.

The game emulation is capable and responsive, reminiscent of the NES Classic's emulation in feel and visuals. The sprites are bright and colorful, the picture is crisp, and the options are very limited.

You have a choice of three different display modes: 4:3 (a slightly wider than originally built pillar-boxed view with no filter), pixel perfect (a narrower pillar-boxed view that keeps the native aspect ratio by pixel count), and CRT (a heavy scanline filter over the 4:3 view).

You can't remap your controls from the default layout in any way, choose between different regional versions of the games, or look up any supplemental material (even a game's instruction manual, aside from a short text summary and a screenshot).