NintendoThe Switch 2 had a bit of an underwhelming launch, with Mario Kart World as its only big first-party draw, and lots of older ports to fill out the launch lineup. But two months after the console’s debut, there’s finally a Nintendo-made game taking full advantage of the hardware that’s worth getting excited about. No, it’s not Donkey Kong Bananza, it’s a three-decade old game originally released on the Super Nintendo.While the Switch 2 is mostly just a beefier version of the original console, it does come with one interesting — and a little baffling — new feature. Mouse mode might not be the kind of idea that gets implemented into most games, but for titles like Drag x Drive, it enables a completely different experience. Decades before mouse mode, Nintendo already tried experimenting with adding a mouse to its console, and the best game ever to use it, Mario Paint, is now on Nintendo Switch Online. On the surface, Mario Paint is a simple drawing program, something like a minimalist, Nintendo-branded version of Photoshop. There’s a fully fledged paint program that lets you create artistic masterpieces from scratch, plus coloring book pages that let you relax by simply filling in black-and-white drawings of familiar Nintendo characters.That’s already an interesting enough idea for an SNES game, but Mario Paint goes so much further in enabling your creativity. It’s already full of stamps of Nintendo sprites, which you can even use in places of regular colors on your brush, and you’re already to make your own custom stamps as well. An animation program lets you create short clips of your creations and save them to watch later.Some of the most interesting parts of Mario Paint have nothing to do with painting at all. In addition to all the visual art tools, the game also includes a music-making program that I can personally attest to spending countless hours on as a kid. In this part of the game, you can arrange a set of Nintendo stamps, each representing a different sound effect. Some are instruments like horns and keyboards, while others are meowing cats or the sound Yoshi makes when Mario jumps on. All of these can be arranged across a scrolling timeline where their position changes their pitch, just like you were reading real musical notation for an incredibly bizarre orchestra. I had zero musical acumen as a kid (or now, to be honest), but the sheer joy of making what you could generously call music from a collection of weird sound effects kept me glued to my SNES playing the original Mario Paint.Mario Paint is a playful way of making art and music with your Switch. | NintendoThe game’s strangest addition is Gnat Attack. Unlike the rest of Mario Paint, Gnat Attack isn’t about making art at all. It’s about swatting flies. The conceit of this strange minigame is that Mario is apparently terrible at emptying the garbage, getting flies overwhelm his kitchen, and now it’s your problem. Using your mouse to control a flyswatter, you have to annihilate wave after wave of bugs to get to the boss, a mutant gnat that fires laser blasts to try to destroy your flyswatter. It’s a bizarre addition to an already surprising game, and like the rest of Mario Paint, I was obsessed with it.Launching back on the SNES, Mario Paint was my first brush with using a computer to make art (again, we’re being very generous with the term), and I imagine a lot of people had the same experience. The simple fact that the same machine I used to play Super Mario World could also let me make music and animations was mind-blowing at the time. Now, there are plenty of games that blend play and art-making, but the sheer strangeness of Mario Paint makes it worth checking out even just for the novelty of it.