Well, the Switch 2 is here! It has landed on store shelves and in peoples homes, and now we get to sit in the fun post-launch period to see what Nintendo has up their sleeves next. I think it’s a safe bet that at least some of it will revolve around mouse controls. I mean, look at Drag x Drive and Metroid Prime 4, right? Having mouse support built right into every system opens a lot of doors that might not be immediately obvious, especially in terms of bringing some super cool brands back into the limelight in more playable fashion than ever before. So with that in mind, here are my top five picks for Mouse controlled games on Switch 2. 

#5 The Incredible Machine

I’ve never been much of a PC gamer, but there was a brief time in the early 90s when my family got our first functional PC and I got to experience some of the awesome stuff I had been missing on home consoles. One of those MS DOS games that grabbed me and refused to let go was The Incredible Machine. It’s basically a game about making your own Rube Goldberg setups. They give you a selection of tools, an open playfield, and an objective. If you need a conveyor belt to move, you connect it to a hamster cage. Drop a ball on the hamster cage, the hamster runs, which turns the wheel, which turns the conveyor belt. It’s genius, and still an absolute blast to play today. It actually did  make it to the home console front once before on the 3DO, and there was apparently some sort of spinoff on PlayStation and Saturn in Japan, but this game lives and dies by mouse controls. It’s literally all about moving a cursor around the screen to drag and drop things, something that’s notoriously not all that fun with a standard controller. It’s also got an absolutely wonderful soundtrack. I believe the property was owned by Sierra, which is under the Microsoft umbrella these days, so it’s entirely possible someone somewhere could dust it off. I think it's unlikely, but boy would it be a perfect fit for Switch 2. 

#4 TinStar

This is one of those one-and-done Nintendo properties that I feel confident a whole lot of people have never even heard of. It’s a weird sci-fi western where you play as the titular TinStar, a robotic sheriff who sets out with his deputy Mo and trusty steed Aluminum to clean up the Wild East. It’s got a fantastic visual style that suits the SNES extraordinarily well, and its soundtrack is pretty top notch stuff as well. But what really set TinStar apart was its writing. It came out around the time when weird cartoons like Ren & Stimpy, Eek the Cat, Freakazoid, and The Tick were filling kids imaginations with irreverent jokes and bizarre situations. TinStar emulates this style astoundingly well for a home console release of its vintage, and has endeared itself to me ever since I first gave it a go. So why the Switch 2? Because when I played through it on SNES, I used the Mario Paint Mouse, and it was brilliant. You never directly control TinStar, because this is a target shooting game. The stages are broken up in a number of styles. There are levels that play out like classic arcade shooters like Operation Wolf, where the camera pans back and forth and you play from a first person perspective, shooting bad guys as they appear, destroying the environment where you can, and trying your best to avoid hitting innocent civilians. Then there are the platforming stages, when you see TinStar running around a side-scrolling level while you shoot the various enemies that cross his path. It’s super cool because you see him shoot the bad guys no matter where they are! But the most intense stuff came in the form of the quick draw battles. You face down your enemy and wait for someone to say “draw” exactly as you’d expect. What makes these bits so cool though is that you don’t just shoot the guy as quickly as possible, you have to actually draw first. An icon will show up in a random corner of your screen once someone says “draw” and  you have to hit that to pull your gun, then aim and shoot your opponent. They’re incredibly intense, and so very much fun to pull off. 

You can technically play this whole game by moving a cursor around the screen with a controller or even using the Super Scope, but the mouse is by far the superior method. The Super Scope is all about playing through a scope, which means you can’t see the whole screen at the same time, and moving a cursor around with a d-pad stinks on a good day. This game is perfect for mouse controls, and the brand itself has a ton of potential. Again, it’s extremely unlikely, maybe even more so that The Incredible Machine, but I want it , gosh dang it! 

#3 ArtStyle PictoBits

This game is a freaking masterpiece. If you want to talk about a game that has almost no shot of appearing on Switch 2, how about a game that’s only ever been available as a DSiWare download title? That's PictoBits, and that’s nothing short of an absolute tragedy. It’s a falling block puzzle game, but it’s very different from the likes of Tetris or Dr. Mario. Colored block patterns fall from the top of the screen, and you have to use the stylus to grab the different bits and then use them to draw around the falling blocks to turn them into solid rectangles and squares. Whatever you manage to complete gets sent up to the top screen where the bits become pixels in a classic NES character sprite. Your job is to prevent your screen from filling up, and gather enough pixels to complete whichever sprite your stage is all about. It’s intense, incredibly fun, and only really possible to play with something like a touchscreen or mouse. Playing this any other way would be an exercise in futility because you need pixel perfect precision and incredibly fast movement, which is something an analog stick or d-pad could never provide in this kind of scenario. Now, I’ve talked about music in the last two entries, too, but I can not stress enough how amazing the soundtrack for PictoBits is. It takes classic NES tunes and remixes them in astoundingly fun ways. And it goes way harder than it needs to. Just listen to this. 

Absolutely incredible. There’s never been another Nintendo platform that could handle this game except the 3DS, where it was technically available as a DSiWare download on the eShop. But a chance to play it on TV? Maybe get some new levels based on other NES games? Sign me the heck up. This game deserves WAY more attention than it’s ever gotten before, and the Switch 2 is the perfect place to do it. I’ve played through it at least a dozen times, and I would gladly do it again, especially on TV. 

#2 Monkey Island Anthology 

Return to Monkey Island was a pretty divisive game for longtime fans of the series. It came out of the gate with a pretty wild art style which didn’t jive well with most people (myself included. I personally think it’s hideous). But even worse, the game’s ending, while creative and kind of sweet in its own way, retroactively tarnished the previous games in the series to the extent that I’m still pretty angry about it to this day. HOWEVER, no matter how the series decided to cap itself off, it can’t take away the fact that Monkey Island is one of the most brilliant point and click adventure series ever created, and it’s way past time we got a proper home console release of the whole enchilada. The first two games in the series were brilliantly remastered on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 back in the day, Escape from Monkey Island hit the PlaySation 2 (albeit in questionable quality), and the original game was made available on Sega CD of all platforms, but this is a series that really benefits from a mouse. It’s a point and click adventure, after all! It just feels right. The closest this franchise has ever felt to properly being at home was the Tales of Monkey Island series that landed on WiiWare, but even the Wii Remote was no true replacement for a proper mouse. It’s time to get all these games in one place, and that place is the Switch 2, a console where everyone has access to a Mouse. Get the special editions of the first two games, Curse of Monkey Island (which I don’t think has ever been on a home console), Escape from Monkey Island, and Tales of Monkey Island all in a single collection, and give a whole new audience a chance to experience these classics the way they were meant to be played, with literal pointing and clicking. Yes, I bought the Limited Run Monkey Island Anthology box set a few years ago, but that was only 9 on PC, and had numerous issues from top to bottom. This is a chance to get it right, and give Guybrush Threepwood and co. the recognition they deserve. 

#1 Kid Icarus Uprising 

If you’ve ever read my work, or listened to the podcast, or seen my videos, there’s an even chance you know I’m a big Kid Icarus fan. I’ve always been so taken with the weird world of these games, and even though there’s only been three releases in the series, I believe in my heart of hearts that it has every chance of being as big as Metroid, or any of Nintendo’s other B or C-tier titles. Not to say Metroid isn’t as good as Mario or Zelda, I just mean in terms of popularity. Metroid is amazing, but it doesn’t exactly pull in Mario numbers. 

But so is Kid Icarus! And Uprising was utterly spectacular! The trouble is, it came out at the wrong time. It may have performed well on 3DS, but this is a game that positively screams to be put on a home console. It’s huge, and I mean that both in terms of content and scale. This is a home console game that deserved to be on the big screen, but the only option at the time was the Wii U, and well, that was never going to take off there. So it landed on the 3DS with a completely bananas control scheme that just didn’t work. It did the job, but this is a 3D action game, which basically requires dual analog to do correctly. But since the 3DS didn’t have a second analog stick (unless you had the weirdo Circle Pad Pro) they created this bizarre “globe spinning” camera system that was actually really neat, except for the fact that it made holding the 3DS for long periods of time extremely uncomfortable. The way it worked was, you’d flick the stylus across the touchscreen to mimic spinning a globe, which would move the camera around. You could then hold the touch screen to stop it whenever you want. It took practice to get the hang of, but it was surprisingly intuitive. 

Adapting this to a simple dual analog game seems like the best option, but the Switch 2’s mouse controls would make the “globe spinning” actually work too! 

Seriously, this game would be such a great showcase for mouse controls in an action game, and with a little visual upgrading to make it look on par with Switch 2 games, Uprising’s action set pieces would be explosive. This game is so stinking cool, and could very possibly find an audience that could propel Pit to the star status he deserves. And nothing would make me happier. 

There you have it. Those are my top five picks for mouse controlled games on Switch 2. I know there’s still a metric ton of other old PC games and such that would make excellent transitions, but these five in particular I think would be the best. They’d sure make me happy, anyway! What do you think?