A new update to the Nintendo Switch Online‘s Nintendo Entertainment System library will add a rewind feature, allowing players to skip back in time to fix a mistake or avoid a game over. The NES Online rewind feature update, accessed by holding ZL and ZR, appears to create multiple rolling save states, allowing the player to choose to start over from any of these.
Along with the announcement of the feature yesterday, Nintendo released a quick video showcasing the NES Online rewind update. It’s not clear from the video how far back the rewind feature will allow players to go, but it appears that each of the save state “frames” captured are only a few seconds apart from one another.
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The NES Online rewind update seems to be an iteration on the rewind feature first introduced in Nintendo’s SNES Classic system. The SNES Classic’s rewind feature didn’t show preview frames at the bottom of the screen like the NES Online’s, but it allowed rewinding “a minute or more” based on the player’s last suspend point. Perhaps we can expect something similar from the NES Online rewind update.
Fans in the comments section of the rewind feature trailer seemed more focused on the Nintendo Switch Online subscription’s lack of SNES games than the new feature, and many are still upset at the Switch‘s lack of a traditional Virtual Console. Nintendo has been adding more NES games to the online library since it launched in September 2018, but fans hoping for SNES games to come to the service haven’t had any luck. The addition of a rewind feature similar to the SNES Classic’s means Nintendo at least remembers some of the success of that system, but there’s still no word on SNES games coming to the Switch.
Nintendo also announced two NES games coming to the NES Online library: Wrecking Crew and Donkey Kong 3. These games and the rewind update will come to Nintendo Switch Online on July 17.
