Unfortunately, we can’t even play through the game. That’s how bad the problem is… which is pretty severe, especially for Nintendo!

So Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards is the game in question. From the name, it’s clear that it’s a Nintendo 64 title. In the Nintendo Switch Online edition of this game (which is in the higher Expansion Pack tier, offering SEGA Mega Drive/Genesis titles alongside N64 games), there’s a bug that makes the underwater levels virtually unplayable. Several people have reported being stuck in the stun animation, which can only be avoided by exiting the level. It is a softlock: the game does not lock up, but a bug has occurred to the extent that it cannot be adequately resumed.

We have embedded a video from Reddit and Twitter. The latter’s uploader, MondoMega (a data miner), claims that the error happens frequently and rules out the possibility of it happening on real hardware (Nintendo 64 + cartridge). In the case of Paper Mario, the game could crash (it took two months to fix), and we’ve seen in the past that the water in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask wasn’t perfect, so the N64 emulation isn’t up to snuff yet. (The graphical bugs in Dr. Mario 64 were supposedly fixed recently, but Star Fox 64 and Yoshi’s Story are still of questionable quality.)

The Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack launched in October, so it’s been six months of slow expansion (which we wrote about, with Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games supposedly to bolster the big N’s service). The emulation isn’t the best, but we’re talking about a company that can be expected to deliver impeccable quality. It is why Nintendo doesn’t give out release dates until it’s sure of the quality of its games…

But let the two videos below do the talking. It’s incomprehensible how the bug was not discovered during testing.

Source:VGC

Yeah, it seems like this error is occurring too often to be something that happens on original hardware. Happened to not softlock me in this case, but that seems rare.

Please fix this asap NERD #Nintendo64 #NintendoSwitchOnline #NintendoSwitch pic.twitter.com/0Mvwrjsxo0

— MondoMega (@Mondo_Mega) May 20, 2022