Soapbox: An Ode To The 3DS, Nintendo’s Workhorse console

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The features of Soapbox allow our individual editors to express their own opinions on hot topics, opinions that are not necessarily the voice of the site. In this room, former official Nintendo Magazine staff member Kate gray explains why the 3DS will always hold a special place in his heart …

Some people remember where they were when they learned of President JFK’s assassination. I can’t tell you where I was when JFK was shot, but it’s mostly because I wasn’t born, and so I wasn’t watching the news at the time, but I can tell you where I was when Nintendo 3DS was first released.

It was midnight on March 25, 2011, and I was in a little HMV pokey in Exeter, the city I was attending college in. It was cold and dark, and I had gotten out of my lovely comfortable bed to be here – my very first midnight launch. My very first midnight whatever, to be honest, because to get out of bed and go to the store at midnight, you either have to really care about something or be really hungry. For me, it was the first.

I traded in my old battered DS Lite for £ 55 off the 3DS (in Aqua Blue) and it seemed like the fanciest thing I had already possesses. This is one of the best investments I’ve ever made to date, right behind a hot water bidet: I played this little piece of plastic to death, and it was still beating when I traded it again against a New Nintendo. 3DS a few years later.

Almost ten years later, the Nintendo 3DS was finally taken out of production. It’s not like you can’t ever get your hands on one of them again – a cursory eBay search pops up more than 4000 results for “3DS”, and Nintendo’s own figures up to the middle of this year indicate that the 3DS family of consoles collectively sold 75.87 million units. These little guys are everywhere. Like the rats in New York City, you’re probably never more than six feet from a Nintendo 3DS.

contrary to rats in New York, 3DS brought me and millions of other people great joy. From the very first moment of its opening, to its rereading Animal Crossing: New Leaf before the release of New HorizonsI have never had a bad time with the Nintendo Click Hinged Handheld. It was my very first experience with AR, if you remember all those little cards that came with the original console – I remember showing my mom that there were little balloons all around the room that you could shoot, like i had personally invented augmented reality. The gimmick quickly wore off, but what a gimmick it was.

Finding out that the 3DS is no longer manufactured is like stepping away from home for the first time. You know it’s for the best, right? You know that things change and die, and the world is changing and getting better. But deep down it does not go. You want to stay in a world that has heartwarming memories and a sweet, non-threatening nostalgia. I want generations to generations to play 3DS and appreciate how good it was.

It does not have to have be so good. It could have been a portable console with a neat technological idea – 3D without glasses! Wow! – but the very fact that I am 500 words to tell you how much I liked this console, and I only have fair mentioned 3D, sort of shows how 3D ended up being a lot less of a selling point than originally intended.

You see, what made 3DS good is the full range of inventive, creative, weird games that no one else was publishing at the time. I have one lot hot takes on this point. I could tell you that the 3DS (and the DS, with which it shares many common features) was partly responsible for the quality of mobile games, because it (along with the iPad, released a few months earlier) did some good – production value touchscreen games cool.

I could tell you that this helped revolutionize the indie game scene, because with the huge popularity of 3DS, you could put your original game in the hands of almost any under 30 who were playing home games. ‘time. I’ll definitely tell you that the 3DS was (and is) one of the most influential consoles for storytelling in games, as creators and developers could tell handheld stories that would immediately find an audience, given the network. massively wide of people who owned the console.

There were games on 3DS that could only really release on 3DS at the time: Zero escape, Lawyer Ace, Professor Layton. It’s no coincidence that many of these games were loaded with history and puzzles, as the 3DS (again, like the DS) was almost marketed as a book – something you could take on the train. or the bus, with games you could play in short periods. . I actually played a DS game called 100 classic books on my 3DS, where you could try to read all of Shakespeare’s works on a small screen. I do not recommend it.

But, in my opinion, at least the 3DS was popular, successful, and wonderful, because it was marketed for everyone. Nintendo’s notoriously gender-neutral marketing doesn’t just include everyone, it ensures that no one feels excluded. As someone who assumed as a teenager that PlayStations and Xboxes just weren’t really meant for me because they only marketed them very strongly, with the kind of games I just didn’t want to play, Nintendo at always felt like a haven of peace.

In fact, the 3DS was often marketed specifically to women and girls – in a disgusting and condescending way, I won’t lie – but I never felt like another console maker that really bothered to admit that j was even The. I bought a 3DS because I wanted it, as anyone could with a rice cooker or a new pillow. At launch it wasn’t advertised as something I might like because I was a girl or something that I might not like because I was a girl. It’s just… was.

RIP, 3DS.

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