Kururin Paradise came out in 2002 and stayed in Japan. For 24 years, anyone in the West who wanted to play it had to import it, emulate it, or give up. On October 14, 2026 it showed up on Switch Online, and that was the first time it ever had an official release outside its home country. Stop on that for a second. Nintendo has Mario, Zelda and Metroid in the vault, and what it picked for one of its most talked-about additions of the month was a puzzle game about a helicopter that never stops spinning. ### What came in, and what each batch says October's additions arrived in two batches two weeks apart. In both, the game that grabs the headline isn't the most famous one. The first batch, on October 14, was Game Boy Advance: *Metal Slug Advance*, *Monster Rancher Advance* and the aforementioned *Kururin Paradise*. *Metal Slug Advance* is from 2004 and has two recruits, Walter and Tyra, surviving a training exercise on a remote island, with cards that modify weapons and abilities. *Monster Rancher Advance* is from 2001 and swaps the music CDs of earlier entries for words and combinations to create monsters. *Kururin Paradise* also includes 16 minigames built around the same rotation mechanic. The second batch landed on October 27 and was Game Boy: *Avenging Spirit*, *Mole Mania* and *Pinball: Revenge of the 'Gator*. *Avenging Spirit* (Jaleco, 1992) is an action game where you're a ghost who doesn't fight directly, possessing other characters and using their abilities across six stages. *Pinball: Revenge of the 'Gator* (HAL Laboratory, 1990) has multiple tables, bonus stages and multiplayer, and is a forerunner of *Kirby's Pinball Land*. And then there's *Mole Mania*. It's from 1997 and was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto. You control Muddy Mole, who has to rescue his family from a farmer named Jinbe, and the whole game is grid-based puzzles: digging, pushing objects, escaping mazes that keep getting worse. As far as I know, nobody was demanding it on forums. But it's the kind of thing you want to try just because Miyamoto's name is on the credits. ### Who pays for what This is where the enigma starts to have an answer. The three Game Boy games are included in the standard subscription, no Expansion Pack needed. The three Game Boy Advance games already require the pricier tier. Nintendo split the news across both levels of the service in the same fortnight. The base tier gets cheap-to-maintain curiosities. The upper tier gets the Western debut, which is the argument for anyone on the fence about paying more. In Canada, where I found the published prices, the annual Expansion Pack costs CA$63.99 and the family plan, up to eight accounts, CA$99.99. The Expansion Pack is also where Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, GameCube (Switch 2 only) and, since February 17, Virtual Boy live. ### GameCube, one drop at a time The hardest part to explain is GameCube. Four games arrived in 2026: *Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance*, *Super Mario Sunshine*, *Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness* and, on September 9, *Star Fox Adventures*. That last one appeared with no prior announcement. It's a 2002 game from Rare that is played almost entirely on foot, and it's probably the most divisive of the Star Fox games. When GameCube was confirmed for the service last year, an initial slate of 11 titles was talked about. According to ComicBook, almost all of them had arrived by September, except *Pokémon Colosseum*, which many people expected early in the year and still had no date. In my reading, *Star Fox Adventures* is a sign that the public list is no longer the full plan. That's good news, because it means there's room for surprises. It's bad if the surprise arrives ahead of the game people have been waiting on for months. ### The math Nintendo doesn't do out loud In August, GamingBible published a list of 23 Nintendo classics the service needed before the end of the year, arguing the company should speed up. I can't tell you how many have been resolved since. But October's pace, three games at a time with two weeks in between, doesn't look like someone trying to empty that list quickly. Maybe that isn't the goal. A catalog that trickles in gives subscribers a monthly reason to open the app, and deep cuts are cheaper to prepare than first-tier classics. It's a coherent strategy. It's just that someone who bought the Expansion Pack thinking of *Pokémon Colosseum*, or of more heavyweight games, will look at *Kururin Paradise* with less patience than someone who only wanted an afternoon of puzzles. Last November the announcement of new additions came on the 25th. If the calendar repeats, we'll find out what comes next about two weeks after this goes live.