GoldenEye can’t distract from Switch’s most annoying retro gaming trap

The long-awaited re-release of the classic Nintendo 64 game GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo Switch is here today. As announced before launch, the game supports widescreen. When I found out about this, my first thought was not “Oh, great!” Rather, it was “OK, but what about the rest of the library?”

Since Nintendo is finally adding one of the most beloved Nintendo 64 games to Switch Online, let me express some disappointment on behalf of many players.

Give players a choice

Players have been complaining about the mandatory gray borders since the Switch subscription-based library of classic games launched in 2018, but Nintendo hasn’t done anything to change that.

While it’s hard for me to imagine that I really want to have these boundaries, the choice seems to be key here. Players who enjoy the same NES, SNES, Genesis, and Nintendo 64 games on emulators on Windows or Linux PCs, Mac computers, Android phones, and other devices can choose whether to include a frame or simply display black letterboxes on both sides of the picture. Even among the retro compilations released by most other publishers, players are usually given a choice. For example, Sega’s recent Sonic Origins collection infamously made a lot of things horribly wrong on the emulation and presentation front, but at least that part was done right.

Part of the frustration is that it seems so easy to do. Of course, players often assume that problems in games can be easily fixed, even if they are not. Some gamers who don’t understand what game creation is have taken to Internet forums to insist that adding a multiplayer game to any single player game would only take “a day or two”. (Of course, this is not the case.) But, as a developer, in this case, it would be really easy to make the requested change.

As far as I know, Nintendo never explained their choice, but at least it was a conscious choice.

Problem with OLED

For many people, the boundary comes down to personal preference, but for others, it’s a more pressing issue. People who use TVs based on burnout technology find Nintendo’s approach particularly frustrating. On modern OLED TVs or older plasma TVs, there is always the risk that static elements on the screen can permanently ruin the TV picture, even after other content has been displayed. It takes a long time for this to happen on the latest OLED displays, but models released even a couple of years ago carry a higher risk.

One Nintendo Switch model even has a built-in OLED display, but it hasn’t been on the market long enough to determine if there will be issues. In addition, borders undermine the main advantage of this model: perfect black levels.

Widescreen pretty much circumvents this issue for GoldenEye 007 on the Switch, but switching between this game and other Nintendo 64 games just makes the borders even more visible in the latter.

So, this is another request added to a mountain of requests for nearly half a century: Nintendo, please let us get rid of that awful gray border in Switch Online retro games.