Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 357: 10 Years of Nintendo 3DS

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Diamond Feit look back at the Nintendo 3DS on the occasion of its 10th birthday. The li'l fella may have had a rough early childhood, but we explore how it eventually grew into the elegant swan we all knew and loved. Cover artwork by Step Sybydlo.

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network, or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week at Retronauts, move over PS Triple. Here's the DS Triple. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 357-7 of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and this week we are talking about the Nintendo 3DS, because it is now, as of this week, 10 years old, if you can believe that. A decade is a long time, and the 3DS was a long time, and the 3DS was a live for most of it, which actually came as something of a surprise for those of us who remember how it launched. So to celebrate this unlikely survivor, we are talking about 3DS this week on Retronauts. And with me, it's kind of a core team over in Canada, not usually in Canada, but just for the moment, in Canada. Hey, everybody, it's Bob Mackie. And Frankenstick was actually

the name of the doctor. And far, far away. in Japan. Hello. My name is Diamond Fight, but from now on, you can call me the new 2DF. 2DF. Oh, wow, that's a good one.

All right. And I am just Jeremy Parrish. But I would like to ask both of you, before we get started, what was your relationship with the 3DS? Like, how did you first become aware of it? Actually, no, because both of you were in the Games Press with me at the time.

So that's kind of a dumb question. Let me think on that. I actually had secret behind the scenes access to the 3DS before anybody else. Yes. Okay, tell us. That's very exciting. Yes. When I was working at Atlas, we were the filthy Harry Potter's working under the stairs on the MMOs that no one ever talked about and no one ever played and that part of the business has gone completely. They treated me very nicely there, but we didn't get access to all the cool persona things. But one day, a little guy who I still know now, he said, we have 3DS development, hardware, you guys can come over and check it out. And then we went over to check it out. I think it was

either right before it was shown off at Tokyo Game Show 2010. That was the first place it was shown off. Am I right? No, that can't be true because I demoed the 3DS at E3 2010. So E3 would have been several months before Tokyo Game Show. Okay. It might have been right after E3, but before the grand showing it off to the world that I got to play development of hardware. and we were sworn to secrecy. They said, like, no tweets, no pictures. Nothing you play in this room can leave this room. But now I'm allowed to break that NDA.

I played some weird flying demo. And I turned the 3D on. I said, this is going to change gaming forever. And then eventually when I got a 3DS, I played with the 3D on for about three minutes. And I said, this will never go on again. But I felt like I was, you know, ahead of the curve for once in my life, having worked at a developer and seeing, like, hardware before it was even released. And then I have a very strong affinity for the 3DS.

I wanted to be on this podcast, because that was the newest system to come out when I joined one up, when I joined the Games Press officially full-time in May of 2011. And I have a good fondness for the system because I was pretty much in the press for the entire time it was relevant. So I kept up with the system as a professional for most of its life. And you were kind of a cheerleader for the system, right? Like you believed in it even during the dark days. I did. I mean, we worked at IGN's office and would you believe a lot of people in there thought the Vita would win. It would trounce the 3DS.

There was a lot of Sony fanboys in there, and they were proven wrong, ultimately. And I felt like... And yet, I have never seen a place denser with street passes than the IGN offices. That's true. Like, we were able to just blow through those street pass games in a ridiculous amount of time,

because every day we would come in, everyone would put their 3DS on a little shelf, kind of in the center by the snack bar, and, you know, come back 10 minutes, later and just, you know, have to clear out their street pass plaza. Well, I think that's because all of Vita folks were playing 3DS because to this day, nobody knows how NIR works. So no one is using near even now.

We don't know how it works. But yeah, and my other confession I have is I have an ambassador emblem on my 3DS. I inherited it, but it is not mine. I am not an ambassador because when I joined one up, I inherited Frank Cepaldi's 3DS that he had threw one up. So I'm a fake ambassador. Frank Sefaldi deserves all the credit. I'm stealing his valor. Okay. Well, that's fine. I mean, he'll receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his fine work as a 3DS ambassador to 3DS land or whatever nation that was. But it's okay because you can still, you know, reap the spoils. And though those spoils are basically some

NES games that showed up later on virtual console and some Game Boy Advance games that are probably better played on a different system. Yeah, Game Boy Advance games that don't go to sleep when you close the console. That's right. You start a Game Boy Advance game and your only way out is, I guess you can reset the system, like go to go to the home menu, but otherwise you're kind of stuck. It's a weird setup. But anyway, yes, 3DS. How about you, Diamond? Well, kind of similar to Bob in that I would, I had just started my freelancing career in 2009. So kind of 2010 was the sort of slow unfolding of information. I mean, because if you remember, the 3DS's announcement was very strange.

It was kind of one of those, like, bizarre late in the fiscal year faxes. It just sort of came out because I guess there had been chatter in the Japanese press. And so Nintendo's like, yes, we're making one. But we'll tell you more later, but we're making one. Yes, fine. You found it. And yeah, later that year, the information slowly came out. And then it was debuted to the general public anyway in January 2011, in this really

very cold day at Makahari Mesa and just everyone people just sort of showed up. So I was there at the time on behalf of OneUp and it was kind of exciting for me just not only because I got to touch this thing that people were talking about for months and it was very exciting to see it. But since I was the only person there basically reporting for OneUp, like all the stuff I wrote basically ended up on the front page of One Up like all at the same time. So it was it was very exciting for me personally. But yeah, I was really excited. I had enjoyed. The DS, the DS kind of was my reentry point into games after a few years of thinking that games just weren't for me anymore as everything became sort of 3D and just a little too much for me. But then I found, oh, no, here's a system that's full of fun, exciting games that I can carry around with me. So the DS, the 3DS to me was a nice transition. And, of course, the 3DS played DS games.

And yeah, I was really excited when it came out. And I definitely surprised when it stopped selling and then surprised again. when they said, oh, but here are some free games to apologize for buying it, and we dropped the price. But then, you know, by the end of 2011, it was already popular again. So it was, yeah, it's a weird, it's, it's, the system itself is a very strange roller coaster, but eventually it turned out to be really, really, really, really popular. And it's great that you were able to do street pass in America, because I know whenever I visited America with the system, it was always just very slim pickings.

Whereas here in Japan, yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't not find street paths. Everybody had it. Every train I got on, every mall I went to, I was just flooded with the things. And of course, you know, my annual trip to Tokyo Game Show was like trying to breathe under a waterfall. Couldn't. Yeah. Impossible. Yeah, for a few years there, like any time I visited Japan, I would just take my 3DS, of course, with me.

And basically, anytime I would get on the train, I would just take it out and clear out my street passes and put it back in again. next time I got on the train, I'd have to clear out my street passes. It was really, really fantastic. A really great social concept that, you know, I don't know that we'll ever see that in another game system again because it kind of destroyed battery life. But it was just so good and so, so compelling. It was just a really great concept that really, you know, it kind of spoke to Nintendo's ability to take a gadget and turn the gadget itself into play. like, you know, the idea of the system as play. And I really miss that.

That's, you know, something desperately lacking with Switch. Though I do like Switches, you know, sleep battery life. So there's, you know, there's a tradeoff. But as for myself, obviously, I was in the Games Press at the time the 3DS was announced and came out and having sort of carved a niche for myself that went up as the guy who was going to be talking about portable games, you know, it kind of naturally fell to me to mostly take the lead on that. and I'll admit that I felt a little heart sick as it neared launch and when it first came out

because it just wasn't, it just wasn't that strong a system. You know, the original hardware was kind of, eh, it was overpriced. The software lineup was not amazing. There was some neat stuff, but not really much of anything to make someone say, you know what, this is it. I'm going to drop my iPhone for this. This is the thing I want to do. This is my baby.

But it really came around. And it's one of the most impressive comeback stories that I can think of in video gaming where a system that was not dead, but definitely on a very unhappy arc just totally changed its fortunes and ended up becoming one of the better selling systems in history. It was a great time for Nintendo fans, even though Nintendo was losing. They're never more generous than when they're losing. It's true. and never more creative.

Exactly. Like the 3DS and the Nintendo Wii, sorry, Wii, you. Those were, I mean, not good times for the company business-wise, but just very creative and generous times for consumers. And, you know, it's kind of a problem. appropriate that the 3DS sort of went through that phase because the genesis of the 3DS obviously is the DS. And, you know, the DS, we talked about way back in episode 31, apparently. That was like hundreds of years ago. Wow. So long ago. You should go listen to that. We'll wait. Okay. Yeah. So as you know, the DS obviously came into existence at a time that was very fraught for Nintendo. Nintendo was not doing well. The Game Boy Advance was about to get slap silly by the portable, the PlayStation portable, and it was their only moneymaker at the time. You know, GameCube was not doing well. And DS just came in and kind of appeared not quite out of nowhere, but it definitely

surprised people. No one expected it to do as well as it did. And it really turned the company's fortunes around and gave Nintendo, you know, sort of a new focus, a renewed sense of purpose. And they got a little flabby over the course of the following decade or so. And then, you you know, 3DS launched, and it did have that kind of air of complacency about it. You know, I made a joke about PS-Triple, DS-Triple. And in a sense, the two systems, they are a little bit kin, you know. PlayStation 3 was just like this engineer's dream. Ken Kuduragi was like, we put everything in here, go get a second job so you can afford it.

And 3DS was kind of the same way. It was Nintendo finally making good on the 3D. concepts that they had been peddling for decades. I mean, if you look at Nintendo's history, you can look back into the 80s with the Famicom 3D system. And they released like 10 games for the 3D system. But, you know, the Japanese NES had a 3D, a glasses-based 3D solution. There was a Mario Racing game that was in 3D. And, you know, they continued to kind of kick around this idea. Virtual Boy obviously was the big one. And Nintendo even briefly re-canonize the virtual boy when Nintendo 3DS launched. They were like, look, we've done 3D before.

This thing called Virtual Boy. Oh, God. Yes, we did it before. See? But this is going to be the good version. And then, of course, you know, there was the GameCube thing that they tried doing where there was going to be basically a screen that you could put on top of the GameCube. And it would be basically a miniature 3D monitor that would allow you to play games on GameCube in 3D. And that, you know, got as far as a proof of concept with Luigi's Mansion, which was very much, you know, kind of that shoebox diorama design that was really made for it. And then they said, ah, that's ridiculous and expensive. And they dropped the idea for a decade.

But then nothing at Nintendo ever goes away, as we've seen with the Nintendo mega leak, giga leak, whatever. Like, if there's an idea at Nintendo, at some point, someone's going to be like, you know, that thing I was doing. back in 1984, we can finally do that now and make good on it. And this was in a lot of ways that. It was a sort of Nintendo kind of putting a lot of their ambitions and ideas and so forth into a single system, but not necessarily in a way that immediately communicated to the

audience, like you need to own this. Yeah, Nintendo had a history of experimenting with 3D, but I have a crackpot theory that I want both of you to entertain for just one minute. I think that the 3DS would not exist without Avatar, the movie Avatar, James Cameron's Avatar. Because of that movie, to this day, you have to decide, when movie theaters were still around, you had to decide, do I want to see the 2D version of the movie or the 3D version of the movie?

Because of that movie, there was a renewed focus in the idea of 3D entertainment, 3D movies, 3D TV, and now 3D gaming. I think it was, because of that, we all were on the same. page as to saying, yes, we want three-day entertainment briefly. I don't think that really lasted as long as Nintendo had planned for it to last. Huh. You know, I've never actually seen Avatar because it looks awful, and so I didn't realize that's where the whole 3D renewal thing came from, but it sure did suck, and I really hated it. It was the highest grossing movie of all time, I think, still to this day. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, actually, Avengers in-game pushed it out.

Like, they deliberately, like, kept it in theaters and did more pushes and added more stuff to it so they could knock Avatar out of the top slot. But also, you could still see that movie in 3D, I'm guessing. You could, yes. I think there's definitely something there because, you know, Avatar came out. I mean, obviously Nintendo, as you said, Jeremy, these ideas have been kicking around Nintendo probably for a very, very long time. But the fact is, yeah, Avatar came out in late 2009 and then probably Japan, maybe like early 2010. and it was a phenomenon, it was a global phenomenon, everyone talked about 3D, and I remember it definitely, the next couple, like, years of video games, everyone talked

about 3D, Sony talked a lot about 3D. I'm pretty sure I bought a television that has a 3D function, but I never turned it on, so I don't know how it works, but there was just a thing where everyone was talking about it for a while, Nintendo kind of, I think, in accordance with Bob's theory, I think they may have even pushed it out a little quickly, just like, oh, well, we've had this idea kicking around, and here it is, and it's ready now. And that's why I think it launched kind of, it was, you know, the announcement was kind of a rush. The launch was kind of a rush and everything seemed a little bit.

They were, because also I think the DS maybe wasn't lasting as long as they had hoped because of, well, I think because of piracy, frankly. Yep. So I think they kind of like, oh, the 3D is hot right now. Here's this idea we've had working on. Our DS isn't doing so well. Go, go, go. And then it just happened. And it almost worked and then it didn't work.

And then it kind of worked. Yeah, I think 3D never really properly came into its own until VR became, you know, powerful enough and high resolution enough to really keep up with it. So all these, you know, 3D screens and glassesless 3D and that sort of thing, like the entertainment industry pushed it really hard so they could sell you new versions of things. But it just never really, I never really saw much actual enthusiasm for it. And, you know, when I was working at OneUp, Sony sent us a 3D TV, and I ended up having that on my desk to use as my gaming TV, but I pretty much just played Wii U and Xbox 360 games on it, so I never actually used the 3D function. It was just kind of like, why is this here?

And then, you know, before the PS4 launch, they killed one up, so it didn't even matter. But yeah, looking at the timeline, DS was definitely, you know, it did really, really well, like astonishingly well. And then in 2009, the market just collapsed. And it was because of piracy, but also because of mobile gaming, because that's when Apple, you know, made smartphone gaming and a thing that wasn't just like, hey, you can play some flash apps on the right website on your phone. Or here's J-Mode stuff that you can control clumsily, almost like a console, but it's bad.

Like suddenly, you know, mobile gaming was touch-based and, you know, accelerometer based, and it was good. and so that that was a dual threat that just hit all at the same time for DS. And Nintendo, you know, they launched the DSI in 2010 to kind of patch things over. They added region locking that would basically be an anti-piracy measure. They added digital distribution, which was, you know, a way to, again, prevent piracy because you couldn't just copy a cartridge, dump a cartridge when you had a digitally distributed game. It was all locked to the system.

but that never really caught on sufficiently well, even though the DSI XL is an amazing system. I love that hardware, but it just wasn't that big a deal. So, you know, that was definitely a stopgap, kind of like, you know, the 32X before the Saturn, except it didn't scuttle the market. So, yeah, then they launched the 3DS,

which they announced in, as you mentioned, in a press release in March 2010, it was shown to the press at E32010, so that would have been June. and at E32010, they had a bunch of little individual demos. It was like, hey, here's a thing where you turn on the 3D and you have to jump around different platforms. And, you know, it was a good proof of concept.

But then kind of the big one that everyone wanted to see was Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater 3D, which was basically the initial jungle mission, you know, the virtuous mission, done up, you know, in a kind of like a 10-minute demo, on 3DS. And it was like, wow, here's PS2 quality graphics, or close enough, but in 3D. And they tweaked the gameplay to make the 3D, you know, matter. So that was pretty impressive. And then at E3, Nintendo used to have this tradition where they would invite certain press

to these roundtables and the little theater off the hallway. And, you know, various designers, Tezica, Miyamoto, so forth, would show off, you know, a game that was coming. that fall, like, you know, New Super Mario Bros. We or something. I think that might have been, actually, they might have just talked about 3DS at that one. But I just remember going into that little theater, and as we were getting, you know, taking our seats, they had 3DS units that they were handing around to press as they were coming in. And so this was a closed situation. They didn't have the tether girls connected to the systems. It was like known people in the press that could be, you know, relied on not to run away with their hardware or something. thing. And, you know, they were taking great pride in this. And once everyone was seated, they were like, so did you see? Did you see what we had? And what they had was Akrona of Time 3D, which hadn't been announced yet. And was on the screens of the, you know, it was like the, it was basically just the title screen of the game. But it was like, hey, here it is in 3D. You can see Apona run around the field and hear the music in 3D. So, you know,

they were pushing it pretty hard. But when it finally launched in February 2011, they did not have Metal Gear at launch. They did not have Ocarina of Time at launch. It was like some kind of half-baked games like Steel Diver. Pilotings was fun, but there just wasn't anything that was like super compelling. I think, I don't know if this is another crackpot theory, but I think a lot of the weak performance of the 3DS in its earlier years is because the economy just crashed a few years before. And as someone who personally experienced the effects of

that, I was not in any financial status to be buying a new $250 handheld anytime soon, like right after it launched. And yeah, I really feel like that's why Vita 3DS and Wii even though bad marketing, bad ideas, I feel like if the economy was stronger, they wouldn't be such big failures. I, yeah, I definitely agree. And I think they were devices built around the idea of a stronger economy where people had money to burn. And that just wasn't the case. I think also in Japan in particular, because it launched here in February 2011. And then March 11th, 2011 was the undersea earthquake and the tsunami and the nuclear accident. And that was just a major issue all over Japan. And the impact of that touched every level, including

obvious video games and I think a lot of people suddenly like well I'm not spending I don't have money to spend anymore or I don't feel right spending money and like a lot of games just were games that had disaster themes of course were delayed but just a lot of games in general were just suddenly delayed or put off and I think a lot of people just went went out less like it just had this major sort of chilling effect here and I think you could you can see that in the numbers at the time where it's like it's it debuted and it did okay and then all of a sudden march and it's like oh no no one's buying this anymore and it just it no one bought it for a few months Once.

Yeah. So just a lot of things conspiring to kind of defeat 3DS. But, you know, taking on its own terms, the system was, I think it was pretty impressive. It was, you know, even though it was given the 3DS name, so clearly tied to DS, it still continued the line of continuity that Nintendo had had with its handheld since 1989. You know, Game Boy was compatible, you know, forward compatible or backward compatible with Game Boy Color, which could then work on Game Boy Advance, and then the original DS had a Game Boy Advance slot, and then you got to 3DS, and it could play DS games. So it was this kind of, you know, even though you couldn't go all the way back to Game Boy, it still just felt like continuity. And in terms of the hardware, 3DS really was an evolution of DS. Just like the DS, it came with two arm processors built in. One of them was more powerful. It was a dual core arm processor, and that was the one that drove the top screen. It had a lot more RAM. You know, even though it was built in the same basic form factor as DS with two screens,

only the bottom screen was the same dimension, like pixel resolution as the DSs. The top screen was, let's say, 400 by 240 pixels. It was actually 800 by 240 pixels, but the idea is that it was displaying two 400 by 240 images that were then sort of sandwiched together to create a 3D effect. But, you know, DS was 256 by 192. So that's a pretty significant jump. And it could produce, you know, superior graphics. It could do 3D on both screens, which the DS couldn't really do easily. It had the addition of an analog slider pad. It had better Wi-Fi. It had always on passive connectivity, which is where the street pass came in. And of course, it had the 3D slider. So you could adjust the severity of the 3D

effect, including turning it off, which is what many people did. I had it on for a spell. Yeah. I feel like it wasn't quite ready for prime time. I didn't think it quite worked until the new 3DS came out with the eye tracking feature. Before that, if you have the old 3DS, you kind of have to find the zone in which the 3D works and hold it there, which is not the most comfortable way to play a portable game. Yeah, yeah.

I actually had totally forgotten about the new 3DS's eye tracking, but that was a big change, of course, and then around the same time they came out with the 2DS, which just got rid of the 3D altogether. And basically every game still played fine, which made, you know, kind of undercut the idea like the sales pitch that, hey, 3D, it's the way of the future. Well, here's, here's those games in 2D and they're still fun. By the end of the system's life, a lot of games just didn't have 3D features and they were fine with releasing them that way. Yeah. And, you know, that was okay. I think once the 2D. came out, it sort of became acceptable, you know, like it was basically, basically Nintendo

sanctioning the abandonment of 3D effects. They were just like, yeah, it's fine. Just make some good games. That's what really matters. But the 3D was interesting. Like the way it worked, it was kind of a big deal if you were into 3D, that here was a system, a self-contained system with 3D capabilities. It was glasses free 3D, which, you know, that's pretty, you know, that's pretty important when you're playing a portable system. You want to just pull it out of your pocket, pop the top open, and start playing, not to have to also slide out a pair of glasses and then look like a complete goon sitting on the train or something. It was about as compelling a case as a portable system with 3D was going to be able to make, I think. I think it's funny when you look back at the early ads for the system, at least the ones that I saw here in Japan, it's because since the 3D graphics were very much, you had to see them in person. Otherwise, it wouldn't translate. So the early ads, they hired boy band Arashi, who as of this recording are about to officially break up. But they were, they've just been, they've been pitched people their entire lives. Like, they've sold everything. And the ads were just members of Arashi opening the system and looking at it. You didn't see the screen. You just saw their face look. looking at it, and you just watch them react to it, which is kind of a lot of Japanese television anyway. But, like, that was the entire ad. They didn't tell you what the games even were.

It's like, here's a face you know. They're looking at its screen and look at their face, and that's a 3DS. And that's how they were, that's where they were selling it. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how Nintendo pitched it here at E3 with the announcement where, you know, Reggie Fisomeh popped open a 3DS and he's like playing and laughing and all of a sudden Bowser pops out of the screen and burns him. It's a little more goofy and comical, but the same kind of effect. Like, hey, we're not going to, you know,

no one can tell you what the 3DS matrix is. You must experience it for yourself, that kind of thing. But the way the effect worked was basically, kind of like the virtual boy was rendering two screens at a time. The 3DS was doing the same thing. But instead of having the two screens side by side as they were in Virtual Boy, where you had kind of like this binocular view, the way it worked was almost like a lenticular screen. So the top screen of the 3DS was, as far as I understand it, it's basically

perforated. So like between lines of resolution, it's basically see-through. And the 3DS slider, or the 3D slider, you know, to change the depth of the effect, what that's basically doing is moving the screen back and forth across the screen that's beneath. So it, if it, affects sort of how much of the other image is coming through. And the, you know, kind of the way that you experience that. It's hard to understand, like I get it in my head what it's doing, but I can't really put it into words. But basically, if you've looked at one of those lenticular stickers where you have, you know, the ridged plastic and there's a different image painted and it's broken up across different angles of, of the ridges, that's kind of what

3DS was doing, except instead of being a plastic, you know, pre-printed sticker, it was real-time 3D graphics. So it's a very expensive Mad Magazine fold-in, just folding in on itself. Yes. I wish Al Jaffe had created a video game. That's a shame. All right. So that's basically the sales pitch. You know, the analog slider was a very welcome edition after the 3D, or the original DS, which just used a D-pad. And then they had the thumb thing that they gave up after. like a week. They were like, yeah, forget it. That's stupid. This was proper 3D. And, you know, the 3DS was

backward compatible with the DS. And one of the first things I did was boot up Super Mario 64 on 3DS. And I was really pleasantly surprised to discover that the analog slider, although it didn't add proper analog control to Mario 64 DS, it did make the game feel more like playing on N64. Like, the smoothness of the motion on the circular slide pad for the analog slider did a pretty good job of kind of translating into commands for the D-pad and it made the game feel a lot smoother. Of course, there was the problem with the backward compatibility that when you launched a DS game, it would automatically try to fill the resolution of the screen. And now that I think about it, the bottom screen was higher resolution than the DS. So basically both screens were scaling the DS's graphics up. And I don't know what like math they used, what algorithm they used to scale up, but it's the worst.

It like 3DS or DS graphics on 3DS if you don't hold down the start button to keep it at the actual one to one pixel dimensions just looks awful. It's so bad. Like shockingly bad. It's like, you know, even worse than NES virtual console on. Wii you. Like, it's astoundingly ugly. Sorry, I feel like I've been kind of ranting, so someone, please feel free to jump in and talk about stuff. You mentioned the slide pad. I just want to mention that, to me, the slide pad reminded me of the old NES max controller, which was not analog in the slightest, but it just had that feel to it, that sort of that big

disc that fit under your thumb. So hearing you talk about playing, you know, DS games on 3DS, even though it wasn't analog, but you still had the, it just felt. good with having that slide under your thumb. I very much enjoyed it. Yes, but fortunately, the circle pad on the 3DS worked the way you thought it should, and the actual sliding thing was the control, whereas the NES Max, that sliding red button thing was just there for show. The actual control part was the ring around the sliding area. It was just, I never got the use of, never got the hang of that. And I just revisited it to talk about the NES Max while playing RC Pro-Am. And even now, like 30 years later, I still just cannot get my head around that

controller. I loved it. Oh, well, I can tell you why. I know people did. I never really like the design of the first version of the 3DS because the last Nintendo portable that I bought was the DSI, which was just one of the most solidly built portable systems ever. It could survive a war. And I always felt like when I was playing with the original 3DS, there was just something flimsy and creaky about it. It didn't feel very solid, not until the 3DS XL came out that I actually think it was a solidly made piece of hardware. Yeah, and the XL was great because the XL didn't, it practically doubled the size of the screens. Like the original 3DS, when you go back and look at it, it's kind of surprising how much of it is just plastic and how small the screens

actually are. But the XL, it's basically like screens and enough of a bezel. to give you controller space and speakers. It's just screen. It's just like, here are the visuals. Very nice. It's definitely the one that I, as soon as it came out, I got it. And I actually ended up getting a second one because they had the special Zelda, Zelda edition that was gold. So that's been my 3DS.

I actually never upgraded to the new 3DS just because by that point I was kind of, well, I don't need the, I don't need the extra stick or whatever. But yeah, the 3DS XL version definitely felt good. Still, I actually, I can tell you right now, I was able to dig it out in advance to this podcast and I messed around with a little bit. And I was like, this really does feel very nice. It just feels nicer in my hands, even than the switch, you know, just a very comfortable feeling. Yeah, my personal favorite model of the 3DS is actually the 2DS, the new 2DS XL, which is a very baroque name. There's so many models of the 3DS. But the new 2DS XL is by far the best feeling and most solid and most satisfying variant of the hardware, in my opinion.

And I have one that I, you know, paid to have modded with video output and everything. And currently I've let the battery run down on it because anytime the battery is charged up and I walk by it, I'm like, oh, I want to just play all the games on it. There's so many 3DS games. And I just, I don't have time for that. Like, I've got hundreds of games on my Switch that I need to play. I can't be farting around with Etri and Odyssey untold again, but I want to. You know, the 3DS definitely came into its own over time and ended up having one of the strongest console libraries ever. Like, there is just so much good stuff on that system.

So, you know, the kind of the way I was feeling when March 2011 rolled around and I was like, I'm going to support this thing because I believe in portable gaming, but, man, they've really got to do better. And, you know, a year later, they were doing better. I feel like just the general sense of what the games were like for the system is that, like, when I play Switch, I'm like, oh, boy, Switch is the best portable system ever. It's so great. It's so handy. I could play it on my TV. I could take it with me, et cetera.

But then when I play a 3DS, I'm like, oh, we have strayed from God's path by losing two-screen gaming. There's just something so good about the design of those games, even if it's just a map, even if it's just a menu, that adds so much more utility to the gameplay experience, so much more ease of use that I feel like we have lost something with the death of both the WiiU and the 3DS. Like dual screen gaming was the future, we just walked away from it. I agree. I think about a lot when I try to play, when Super Mario Maker 2 came out on Switch, and I was rightly excited to play it, but somehow it just didn't have the same. hook. And I guess I think it's because, yeah, instead of looking at one screen, instead of having that two screen attention, I'm like, oh, wait, no, I have to do all this on one screen and, you know, didn't have a, didn't have a proper touch device. Stylus. Thank you. Didn't have one of those

proper things. I was like, this, yeah, this is not the same. Yeah. I mean, I would still rather use a switch over the original 3DS model any day. But yeah, there is, there is something just, you know, even the switch light is so much more portable and so much more compact. and a pleasure to use if you're playing on the go. But there's just something about the 3DS where it's so compact and it has that little, you know, the top that you flip up. And it's just like this self-contained device

that is made to be carried with you and be used to play video games. And there's just nothing like that around anymore, which is a real shame. I absolutely agree with you, Bob. We have strayed from God's light. But yeah, the 3DS had to be able to be able to, the 3DS had to evolve a while before it got to the point where it was that good.

You know, the original model, we talked about how the hardware was kind of, I don't know, like the plastic felt sort of cheap. It was really hard and brittle and glossy. I don't know about brittle, but it just felt like it would be brittle. It had a smallish screen, which admittedly made it seem like it had higher resolution graphics than it actually did. But, you know, it's kind of fakery. And I don't think you really got the full impact of the third.

3D effect on those tiny screens. It had really bad battery life. It was like four hours of playtime, and if you had street pass active, you had to charge that thing daily. And it was so expensive. It was $250 at launch. $250 American dollars. That's a lot of money for that tiny little system.

And then the games were, you know, like $40. So it really felt like they were asking a lot. And, you know, compared to the Vita, which came out. a few months, basically less than a year later and was much more powerful, you know, somewhere between PS2 and PS3 in terms of power, or at least, you know, within kind of the analog of portable processors. It just, it was kind of a hard sell, kind of like, you know, originally DS versus PSP. I think when you look at the VITA, like, obviously they both launched with this, with this high price tag and both sort of suffered for that. But at least when you look at the video,

you're like, I see where this money's going. This screen is amazing. And I still have my launch Vita, and it is still a really nice looking screen. So, yeah, at least as far as 2011 models go, 3DS versus Vita, appearance alone, the Vita looked so much nicer. Do you think the Vita is the reason that we got the Frankenstick? I had actually forgotten about the Frankenstick until, I guess, Diamond, you added that in the notes? Yeah, because it was just the whole news about it was so bizarre. You know, the 3DS came out in February slash March, and we went through E3.

and people announced more games, more games, more games. And there was a rumor that there would be an add-on. And people were like, that's ridiculous. How the hell could you add on an entire stick to a handheld console? And then, like, a week later, it's like, no, it's real. Here it is. And they showed it. Like, what?

And I think it was timed either right before or almost exactly with the announcement that they had a Monster Hunter game coming to 3DS. And it's like, oh, well, then, of course you'd want a second stick on there. And, but it just, it came out of nowhere. It looked ridiculous. I mean, this thing, of course, I bought one. it actually requires its own power source, so you have to buy a battery and put it in there.

It is the weirdest goddamn thing. Yeah, Bob, I know you're a big monster hunter guy. So did you play much of the 3DS Monster Hunter? And did you try it without the Frankenstick? I played a lot of 3DS Monster Hunter, mostly with the nub on the new 3DS. And I will say, like, that version of Monster having a camera stick is not necessary

because the game was never built with that in mind. It is so much easier to hit one button to snap the camera behind you constantly, than to, you know, awkwardly move and just, you know, gently nudge a camera all the time. So it honestly didn't help me that much. I don't think a lot of people used it. And even in the options, you had to turn it on for the games to recognize it. So, you know, Nintendo's always kind of with their hardware iterations like, oh, whoops, here's some stuff we didn't think of. But, you know, they did work on it. There was a 3DS XL, which shipped in July 2012.

shipped in red and blue and came out around the same time. I want to say as Mario, was it New Super Mario Brothers 2? Very close, I think. I'm pretty sure I put through that game on my new Excel version. So, yeah. Yeah, I seem to remember demoing Mario, New Super Mario Brothers 2 and the Red and Blue 3DS XL at San Diego Comic Con, San Diego Comic-Con at the same time. So, yeah, I'm thinking those were kind of simultaneous releases. And someone noted here that the XL got its own Frankenstick, which I totally forgot about. But yeah, the Frankenstick is called that because you have to add it on to the console. And it's like it, you know, adds 50% to the bulk of the system.

So when you have the 3DS XL and you add 50% to the bulk of that, it's kind of unwieldy. Like it's, it's a little bit ridiculous. I had to look it up because I forgot. I forgot the Excel had its own too. But it was like a, it was almost like a, I had to look it up. to make sure. Because, like, did they even make one? And they certainly did.

They did. Yes, I remember. And I don't think that ever came to America. I know I had the Frankenstick via one-up for the original 3DS, but I don't know if the Excel Frankenstick ever came out in America. I mean, it's, it's debatable just because in theory it was there for Monster Hunter. And at this point, Monster Hunter was still not big outside of Japan. As I recall, through the 3DS version of the extra, excuse me, what is the official name?

CirclePad Pro. Yes. Yeah. When the U.S. got that version, it was tied heavily to Resident Evil Revelations, because that's a game obviously that Americans wanted. So it took a still a few years after that for Monster 100 to catch on outside. So like if that even came out in America, it was probably tied to some other game that they thought it would be good for. Whereas here in Japan, it was all like, oh, you like Monster Hunter, right? So here's this thing you need. Yeah, I honestly couldn't say if it came to America or not because I was, you know, so deep into this whole ecosystem that I pretty much, you know, wasn't really paying attention to regions on stuff. If something came out in one territory, I was like, I got to have it. So I definitely had the Frankenstick that I almost never used for Excel. But I don't remember if I bought an American one or if it was just in Japan. But even if you never came to the U.S., that's only fair.

because we got the Nintendo 2DS in October 2013, and I didn't realize this until I just saw this in the notes, but Japan didn't get it until 2016? That's ridiculous. When it was first announced, it was American only, and I was kind of stunned. And I almost bought one because we haven't really addressed the 3DS's most glaring failure was the fact that the entire system was region locked, which was infuriating. So when the 2DS was announced and it was America exclusive, I was sort of half to base getting one just so I could play American

American 3DS games because I was tired of, you know, there were a lot of RPGs and things that I kind of wanted to mess around with, but I didn't want to spend half my time, you know, deciphering the kanji first. So it was, for me, it was almost a selling point, but eventually, yeah, eventually everything just sort of became one

umbrella. But yeah, for a few years there, it was only in America. Kind of like that weird Canadian Wii that came out. Oh, yeah, yeah. That was the one that didn't, like, it couldn't connect to the internet? I forget what it's handicap was. I remember it looked, it looked cooler, but like it just didn't do something. And it was like, but it was very cheap. And it had an only component video out or something. I don't know. Composite video. Had a maple leaf on it somewhere. Yeah. So, so, so the 2DS was, was interesting because it got rid of one of the basic features of the, of the, the DS family, which is the hinged style. It is, it's a weird little system that's basically like a wedge. It's kind of shaped like an Imperial Star Destroyer or something. Yes. exactly, a doorstop, a hunk of cheese.

But it was basically meant to be, you know, the 3DS for little kids. It was much cheaper than the base model, even after the price drop. And the really interesting thing is that they, I think they cut down on the cost of manufacturing by only giving it a single screen. And this is the weird thing that I was told this at a demo of the system by someone who worked in Nintendo and reported it. And I had people in the press who were like, are you? you're just making stuff up this is what are you talking about this is stupid uh but no the the the two ds

the original 2ds because it is a wedge it's just like a solid slab of plastic there's only one screen in there and then what they did was uh like it's a big screen and then the screens are like the separate screens are created just by the frame of the plastic and then there's a touch overlay on the bottom screen that's something we didn't mention before is that the top screen is 3D the bottom screen is not but the bottom screen is touch and the top is not so it's this kind of weird disparity of functions but yeah like the you know in theory there was like this full screen in there that would have been like super high resolution I guess but uh the way they they built the system was just to put a single component in there and then cover over it to pretend it was two separate

screens which is just it's wild more like one DS exactly except that's just that's just called the Diaz. So after the 2DS in October 2014, wow, it wasn't really that late. The new 3DS came out. This is where Nintendo's naming conventions really start to be stupid. It is a more powerful version of the 3DS. They could have called it like Super 3DS or the 3DS2 or something. But no, they called it the new, the Nintendo new 3DS.

It's called the Nubb 3DS. Yeah. That would have been hip. That's way too cool for Nintendo. But it was a more powerful system. It ran like I don't even, I can't make sense of my notes here. There's something about arm systems running at two and a half times the speed. Double RAM, internal flash storage. And of course, the right analog nub. It was basically like the PS, the IBM think pad. like control nipple on the, like in the middle of the keyboard. It was basically that as a right button. It was a very strange little thing. I remember I was there when they, that was a thing that also, that definitely debuted at Tokyo Game Show along with the new Monster Hunter game. And I was there at the time covering it for Wired. And I remember I played with it and I still, I'm still not a Super Monster Hunter fan, but I played this new game with this new thing.

And I was kind of like, well, it's definitely nicer to have this thing there, but it really feels uncomfortable. like for me it was like you know you put your right thumb on those four buttons and this thing was sort of like a little further in so you kind of had to reach your thumb over the other buttons to adjust this thing and it was just for me it was not comfortable at all and the gentle loving readers have wired sent me a lot of messages telling me how maybe you just have weird hands dude and like I just all I can do is tell you I didn't like how I felt okay you can enjoy it if you want but I that's one reason I sort of never really bought the new 3DS because I felt like that thing was not comfortable for me. Little did I know that a few months later, they would announce that, oh, it also plays Super Nintendo games on virtual console, which would have been a big selling point to me more than the little nub. I was at the launch event for this in the Bay Area, and alongside this, they unveiled the Xenob for the 3DS, which it's a miracle that they got that game to run on the 3DS, but it's also

not the ideal way to play, and the nub didn't really help. but I will say the extra horsepower was noticeable when it came to frame rate on certain games. Yeah, and just moving around the menu, once you're like me and you have several hundred games in your system, it starts to slow down a bit. So having that extra horsepower made a big difference just for the basic functionality.

But this is another weird case of Nintendo just fragmenting their market. Fortunately, this one wasn't too severe because, you know, the new 3DS was, more powerful than the stock 3DS, considerably, which allowed it to support Super NES games and virtual console, yes. But there were also exclusive games that would only run on new 3DS. But there are only seven of those. That's how quickly people gave up. One of them is Minecraft. One of them is Xenoblade Chronicles 3DS or 3D. And one of them is an ace combat game. I don't know what the other four are. But there are just a hands.

full of games, they can only run on new 3DS or new 2DS. And by the end of the system's lifespan, they were like, hey, you know what, you can buy Hyro Warriors, you can try to run it on a normal 3S. Technically, it runs. Technically, there is a frame rate, but, you know, you can't return it, but it is a game designed for the new 3DS, but they just made it work at least at the most basic terms on the old hardware. Yeah, it was the cyberpunk 2077 of its day.

So, yeah, the new 3DS. actually came in two models. There was the new 3DS and the new 3DS Excel. The new 3DS, it was actually a very appealing system. It was, you know, not much larger than the original 3DS. The screens were bigger, but not like XL sized. But it had a really good feel to it. It was really solidly built. The plastics were matte. It was a really nice system. I just wanted bigger screens, but I really liked that one. And it also had something unique, which was interchangeable faceplates. So wild.

Yeah. So you could basically buy alternate face plates and change the look and style of your new 3DS. It was actually kind of Nintendo cutting into their own business model because their whole business model was like, hey, we just put out like the Animal Crossing 3DS XL. Hey, we just put out the Zelda 3DSXL. Don't you want to change and get this? Because it's cool.

But here you could just like, you could have an animal crossing system or a Zelda system or like Nintendo Hana Fuda card system. It was a, you know, a really nice way to customize your systems. And I wish that had carried over to the bigger system, but it did not. But again, this is another weird regional thing,

because it came out in October 2014 in Japan, and a few months later, we got the American version, but it was only the Excel. And the standard model was not released until the end of 2015 in the U.S. and it was a bundle with Animal Crossing Happy Homemaker. Really, really strange choices.

I don't get Nintendo sometimes. Well, thank you for the face plates were not region locked. Yes. They could have done it. They could have. I guess that wasn't a totally new idea, though, because the Game Boy Advance Micro,

Game Boy Micro, had faceplates, but they didn't really follow that one through. There were like five or six different faceplates you could get. Whereas the new 3DS, like there was a whole section at places like size. soft map in Japan where it was just like a wall of faceplates. Some pretty cool stuff. Like I loved the Hana Fuda card was so cool. It was like a, you know, Sumier kind of drawing of a piranha plant, just like super stylish. But the new 3DS lacked that. It was just,

you know, here's the system that's basically like the 3DS XL, but with more power. Anyway, so finally, the final hardware model we'll talk about the final model. that existed, I guess, is the new 2DS XL, which is what I have now. It is a great system. It's basically the new 3DS, new 3DSXL form factor, just with no 3D. It has really nice thin bezels, so the screens are enormous. It's very compact, about as compact as you can possibly get for a system with screens that big. It's just basically like, here are screens and also a little bit of grip for your hands. And, you know, very slim and lightweight, but it doesn't feel cheap and flimsy. They really knocked it out of the park with that hardware. So as a final statement for the 3DS family, I think it's really great. Yeah, this is the one I need to get. In fact, my new 3DS XL is a little worse for wear. I've been playing with it for a long time. Like the skin is bubbling on it for some reason. I don't know what causes that. But I wanted to upgrade it before they stopped

making DSs or 3DSs. And that was actually this September, I think, is when they stopped making this whole entire line of software hardware so yeah this is the one i need to get and i already have three existing models of 3ds in my home yeah if i'd known that i would have given you my my black and turquoise one uh because i set that aside when i bought the modded 3d s i or 2dxl but unfortunately it's been ebade so you'll have to it's okay you're on your own sorry i think enough came off the production line that i can still get one you think so i hear they're pretty rare. Actually, for a while, over the summer, like, everyone wanted just any portable system or any game system they could get. And so that was actually the reason I sold my old system

because, like, 3DS systems were in hot demand. It took a decade, but it finally happened. It took a decade in a pandemic. I think you have to give Nintendo a lot of credit, though, just for timing-wise, the fact that there was, it seemed like every year there was either a new system or a new reason to get into the system, and they managed to maintain this interest for the system very, very high over time. And the fact is, yeah, I bought one at launch. Then I bought the large version, and suddenly the launch version I gave to my wife, because I think around that time was when the Animal Crossing came out. And then a few years later, when the Zelda one came out, then suddenly the large one became to my wife, and the regular one, launch version just

went to the kids. So suddenly, like, we had all these 3DSs, but everyone was playing them at least a little bit in the house. And that's all because Nintendo just kept giving me a reason to go back and get another one. Yeah, that's definitely their approach. They've kind of done that a little bit to a lesser degree with Switch because my launch Switch is now my wife's launch Switch and is exclusively a system for playing Animal Crossing, whereas I use a 3D, a Switch light and, you know, use it. In theory, when I travel, but I don't travel anymore. But if that were happening, then that would be how it was used. I feel like there's a version of reality right now where the switch pro actually came out, but that didn't happen.

But I feel like it's too, too much has been talked about it for not to be real. I know that's a soft topic, but I want it. So please, please give you one. Two screens, two screens. Yeah, that's what's pro about it. The new switch 2D pro. Excel. Hey,

And beer? Cat videos? B. Arthur? Incorrect. Nothing! The answer is absolutely nothing. All right, all right. You know, actually, I do think you're right. Agreed. We're here of the Dogcast.

We podcast about video games and beer. And beer and video games. Available weekly on the Greenlit podcast network. Pete Arthur. Yes. Hello, my name is Jonathan Dunn, and I'm inviting you to listen to Our Three Sense, a weekly podcast where myself and two of my very best gaming chums are counting down our top 100 favorite video games.

of all time. For all the episodes and information, check out our website. www. Our3Cents.com.com.com. U.K. Retro-grade amnesia is a comprehensive podcast about classic Japanese RPGs. Each season, we cover a single game, chapter by chapter, beat by beat. Season one covers Xenogers. Season two covers Krono Cross. Each episode, we play a section of the game and unpack the story, mechanics, music, and themes. Also, our post-production AI companion, the fake net, fills us in on the finer details we may have missed. Initializing fake hair

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on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right, so we've talked a lot about the 3DS's somewhat inadequate launch. Let's actually turn back the hands of time 10 years to February 2011 and look at the system's launch how badly it was fluffed and how Nintendo recovered. So I had forgotten just how sort of, ugh, the launch of the system was until I sat down and actually checked out the list of launch games, the lineup. And it's not great. So for $250, you had a system that could street pass, which was great.

We should talk about that in a little bit. It had a couple of, like, built-in games, like Face Raiders. Did you guys ever play Face Raiders? I mean, I played it once to see how it worked, and then I stopped playing it forever. Yeah. Yeah. So that was about it. And then you could pay like 40 or 50 bucks to get Asphalt 3D, a racing game, bust a move universe, puzzle bobble but bad. Combat of Giants, Dinosaurs 3D. I do not remember this game existing. What is this game?

Boy, I've never heard of it. I don't think I've ever seen the box art even. I mean, that to me sounds like a kid's game or something where it's like you control dinosaur against other dinosaurs probably. The name sounds familiar, but I definitely absolutely did not even play that one. For some reason, I thought it sounded like an Ubisoft game, and it is. That's all I can tell you. There you go. Lego Star Wars 3, the Clone Wars. Weird, which plays like every other Lego game ever.

Madden NFL, which might be the last time Madden ever appeared on a Nintendo system. Nintendo Dogs and Cats, which should have been a slam dunk and no one cared about. apparently the addition of cats to this series just like undermined it like no one cared Nintendo Dogs was a huge thing someone just deleted Pilot Wings Resort what happened oh that was me on no I moved it down a line on accident so okay I don't mean to erase this from history I just never played it pilot wings resort was the one game that I played most at launch aside from like DS games and it was um I don't know if it's really a proper successor to pilot wings but I guess it's more in the Pilot Wing 64 vein, but instead of being that whatever aesthetic that they used

for Pilot Wing 64, which was garish and bad, it was more along the lines of, you know, We Sports Resort. In fact, that's why it's called Pilot Wings Resort, because it's all about me's and it's about that kind of like plasticine style, everything's sort of anodyne and boring. But the actual play of Pilot Wings Resort was really good. You could play, you know, glider and biplanes and jet packs and that sort of thing. And it was fine. The idea was to show off the 3D effects. And I do think, you know, flying around with kind of these 3D graphics,

you know, things flying into your face, giant balls that you were supposed to collect zooming up into your face, it was okay. It was a good time. Not an A plus game, but a solid B. And the 3DS really needed some solid Bs at launch. There was also Pro Evolution Soccer, 20. 11. Rayman 3D, which I assume was Rayman 2. I never played it. I don't know if it was Rayman 3 maybe, like the 3D version of Rayman 3. I don't know. Hmm. I do not which

Rayman it was. All right. So clearly everyone here was really tuned in to the launch lineup. Ridge Racer 3D, which I recall being a sort of underwhelming a compilation of a few other Ridge Racer games. Samurai Warriors Chronicles because everyone loves Muso. The Sims 3, Steel Diver, which was apparently a passion project for Miyamoto. It was a submarine game where you're, it's basically like radar mission, but in 3D. That's probably why it's referenced in Smash Brothers to this day. I don't get it. Yep.

Super Monkey Ball 3D. Super Street Fighter 4. This was my launch title. Okay. Was it good? Well, what was exciting to me was the fact that it was, it was a poor. Street Fighter 4. So that, to me, alone, was kind of exciting because I had played Street Fighter 4 on my

PS3. So the idea that I could take it on the go was very exciting. I also, I can't say I looked forward to it, but I definitely played it at least once. It actually had a first person mode. You could play Street Fighter 3 first person. Oh, yeah. With the 3D effect on, which was really weird. But probably the best feature of it is because that bottom screen was a touchscreen,

you could program up to four moves on the touchscreen. Oh, I do remember that. Yeah, I was like, instead of doing a dragon punch or whatever, you could just push a dragon punch button. And so using that method, I was able to sort of, I was able to do a lot more complicated combos. I was able to finish almost all the tutorial missions because, you know, when you get deep into that thing,

they ask you to do really complicated sequences of moves over and over again without, you know, without making a mistake. And having the touchscreen there was, just made that a nice feature. And I think it almost triggered a very small debate in fighting game communities about can the motions be simplified too much? You know, can special moves be just a button or do they have to be a motion because, you know, you have to learn how to you do the motions. But I don't think the game really took off enough to make that discussion last. But for me, that was my launch title.

I should add, by the way, you mentioned that, yes, these games were kind of expensive. But in Japan, they were even more expensive. Some of these launch titles were 6,000 yen. which is, you know, almost on par with a home console game. But that's just, if you can ask for it in Japan, you get it. So there were definitely some very expensive 2011 releases on 3DS. Man. There was also Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Shadow Wars, which doesn't sound that inspiring.

But this game was designed by Julian Gallup of XCOM fame. I've never played it because it's not really my bag. but by all accounts, it's actually a really good turn-based strategy game. Like before XCOM made its comeback with Enemy Unknown, this was kind of like the secret fix for people who were Jonzing for that. And then finally, oh, sorry, go ahead. I was wondering, like, how many of these games took advantage of the 3DS's special features that I don't think we talked about yet, because there's AR functionality,

there's, I think, a front-facing, and a rear-facing camera, and there's gyroscopes. And I think most of these games use that utility or use those features in some way before everyone wasn't obligated to anymore.

Yeah, I want to say Super Monkey Ball 3D was a gyro-based game. Steel Diver was definitely gyro-based and might have been AR-based.

I can't remember. I did not spend much time with that one. Face Raiders was definitely AR-based. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like not too many games

actually did much with AR, to be honest. It did come with those cards, though, that you would put a card on the floor and Bowser was in your living room or something. And then a few other games would do something similar to that, but it didn't really follow through with it because the technology was as limited as, look, there's a polygonal model in the camera, and that's just kind of it. Yeah, I think AR didn't really take off until Pokemon Go, where you didn't have to have anything external. It was just like, hey, you've got

your phone, look through your phone's camera. Wow, it's Pikachu. He's in your living room. Amazing. that's what people really want. Not to have to put down stupid cards and stuff. Just give me Pikachu sitting on my sofa. And are we going to talk about Street Pass games? Oh, yes. That is where I was headed. Street Pass games, we're so good.

They were. They're so simple and so kind of pointless, but they were so addictive. I did like them a lot. I feel like they waited way too long to release more of them. And I also feel like they missed an opportunity to have a more in-depth street pass game. I understand why so many of them were simple, but I feel like there was an opportunity there while the player base was big to make something that really took full advantage of the street pass feature in ways more than the shallow games did.

And I wish they would have done something with that. it's better than the Switch, which has nothing, but I did want something a little more, and I did play so many of these games. Yeah, my favorite, actually, instead of me saying what I think, let me ask what your favorite games were. I didn't actually play all of them, but my favorite one was the haunted house game that you basically built the layout of the haunted house and explored it, and essentially the weapons that you used in the haunted house were your party members.

in your party. That's the kind of function they served. I will say the only detriment of street pass games is when I would be on trips in the gaming industry with peers, including Jeremy Parrish, it would always be like, all right, I got to catch up with street pass games. And then like 50 minutes later, once someone has cycled through all eight of them, they can finally get out of bed or get out of the chair and go with you to get like food or something. That was the one thing that was the downside is eventually, for a lot of people, they became a burden, just having to go through every street pass game to filter through every person you passed. had to finish my mansion. Okay. Do you feel more complete as a human being now? I do. I feel really

good that I completed the mansion and then I felt really empty when I switched to new 3DS and all of my street pass progress was lost. No. It was heartbreaking. I had my, my little, uh, the little warfare game. I, I built up my, my army so big going to Japan and fighting like people who were, you know, maxed out. I'd gotten really far and then I had to start all over. I didn't mind, I didn't mind starting over on the Haunted House game, because that was really good. It was like Didelian Opus plus, I don't know, I'm trying to think of what the gameplay was analogous to. It was pretty unique, I think.

Yeah. And that's why it was one of the better ones. And, you know, one of the interesting things is that they had, like, genuine developers make these. It wasn't all just Nintendo stuff. It was like, what's usually Naka's company's name, Propay or something? Propa, yeah. They did make the haunted house game, I think.

Yep. and Spike Chunsoft made some games. I think Koei made a game. There were just like tons of developers who were contributing to this. So it was really good stuff. Very addictive. And I did not find it a burden. Once I started to find it a burden, then I was like, yeah, I'm done with this.

I was able to cut myself off. But, you know, it was just about priorities, man. It was not my favorite, but I certainly really enjoyed the flower one just because it was so strange, you know? Like you had to, you would get flowers from people And then you'd breed the flowers together And you grow new flowers And so there was a fun little space shooter That you know, based on the people you met

You got different weapons It was kind of funny how many of these games Since they were so simplistic The only information you got from people Were like a name and the color of their me And it's funny how all these games Assigned different vibes and different colors And it's like

Whatever Brown was, Brown became the hardest because no one, no one's for color as brown. So you'd pick all these people and, you know, you get blues and reds and blacks and whites and all these things. They're like, oh, you get a brown one. That brown one's like a rare one. And depending on the game, that was either exactly what you wanted or exactly what you didn't want.

But, yeah, I ended up changing my, my me's shirt color to white because they were so hard to come by in our area. So I was like, I'm going to do everyone a solid and I'm going to put on a white shirt. You took one for the team. I did. So my, like when I think of my, me now, I always think of myself in a white shirt, even though I had no

desire to wear a white shirt. That's just the kind of person I am. What can I say? I even enjoyed the very basic, I think it was called Find Me, where like your own me was captive and the people you met became warriors

to sort of fight monsters on the way to recapture you. And again, very simple game and the kind of thing where it's like you meet an enemy and the enemy had a color shield and only that color me could hit that shield. And it's like if you didn't meet anyone with that color, then all your street pass people will just go away. So a little bit frustrating, but it was, you know, if you lived somewhere where you were able to go through a lot of people at once, it didn't matter.

But I'm sure in America it must have been even harder because, you know, you really had a scrounge for those street pass people. Yeah. And, you know, when you defeated one of the games, when you beat it, then you got some sort of hat that you could wear. And those hats were like prestige items. Like, whoa, he's got the Demon King hat. He actually finished Find Me. And I did enjoy the race car game also that came out really late just because it was one that you could play in like three minutes. Basically, you saw everyone through your gates and they came in and basically all of them sort of shot their wad racing in that one race right there.

It wasn't drawn out. It was just like, here's a little zippy car race. Well, you're done. Okay, thanks for playing. it was quick and effective. I appreciated that. So looking just kind of the, in the immediate period beyond launch, there were also a few pretty notable games. There was a port of Dead or Alive called Dead or Alive Dimensions,

which was probably where, what's his name? Is it Takagi? I don't know. The Cinerangara guy, who was like, ah, 3D boobs. I'm pretty sure this was the inspiration. There was, of course, Akarina of Time 3D, which was followed up several years later by Majora's Masked 3D

a kind of revised, refined version of the Legend of Zelda Occurine of Time they fixed the water dungeon they did a bunch of things to just make the game more playable, tweak the quality of life, make the graphics nicer, but didn't really change the fundamental underpinnings of what the game was.

Resident Evil Mercenaries, which I cannot keep track of Resident Evil spin-offs, I'm sorry. Alex O'Neill was very disappointed in me. This is when I reviewed for one-up. Essentially, it is an expanded version of a kind of robust mini-game in Resident Evil 4. And people did not like that. They did not like that it was being sold for $40.

Also, for a long time, the save data was locked to the cartridge and could not be erased to prevent people from reselling the game. Eventually, I believe that was patched out, but Capcom really messed up with that. It was a very good port, but of a very slight amount of content. So it was a strange release. And I think Revelations, whenever that came out, was them kind of making good with fans saying, look, we can make a real game on this hardware. Yeah, it was when at the early press events, like that January event that I went to,

the two Resident Evil things they were showing were mercenaries and revelations. They had already announced Revelations. People were getting hyped for it. And I think they even had a demo for that. So mercenaries kind of came out, I want to say, around June 2011. and people, yeah, people were kind of angry. I mean, I know I got it and I played it and I thought, you know, much like the Street Fighter thing, it's like, this is a portable action game, I love this. It's really fun to play.

It didn't have two sticks, but you could sort of, much like, like, Peaceworker style, you could sort of, like, adjust. You could use the four face buttons on the right as sort of a mock, like, stick, and then just, like, shoot with the triggers. So I had a lot of fun with that game. I played it a lot. I played on variable difficulties. I unlocked a lot of, like, secret items. But, yeah, the general response for people were, this game is a free mode in other games. Why am I buying it separately?

But to me, I was like, well, there are no other games like this on the system, so I'm enjoying this. But yeah, the save data thing, it felt like just the weirdest oversight. But definitely there was a conspiracy theory that, you know, it was intentional because they didn't want people like buying used copies of it. I don't know if that's true. But it did feel that. price tag in general felt I think people were upset by it. But I played a lot of it, so I really can't complain. All right. Also, uh, in that kind of early period, uh, Atlas jumped in with Shin Megame Tensei devil survivor overclock, which was basically just a kind of upgraded port of devil

survivor for DS. Uh, but it's a huge game and has a lot of different story branches, like different alternate outcomes. So it's, uh, you know, they added, I think a whole other storyline to. Um, but it's a, you know, they added, I think, a whole other storyline to it or another day of the chronology or something. I can't remember exactly what, but there was a lot to it. And it's a very good and very challenging take on the SMT series, almost like a strategy RPG. So that was, you know, a pretty good addition, even though it was warmed over content. And they did come up with a Devil Survivor 2 a few years later, which was an all-new story. same horrible character designs for the female characters, but I don't want to get into that.

And then finally, Star Fox 64 3D, which was another in-64 game, but with 3D. I review this one as well, and I just started at one-up full-time, probably a few months before this, and it was the first game I reviewed that I thought genuinely deserved an A rating, and I think I did give it an A. I don't know if that review was still online, but it is the best way to play that game. It is just a HD remake of the original game made with no real huge changes, and it runs at a great frame rate, and they re-recorded the voice acting with whoever was left or accessible or available or alive. It is such a good version of that game. All right.

But unfortunately, Star Sox, Star Sox, wow. Star Fox 64 3D, despite its amazing title and high quality, was not enough to single-handedly save things for the 3DS. do well within its first six months of launch. And at this point, We was really kind of on its last legs. It was not doing well. So Nintendo needed a surefire profit stream. And the DS had been that, the Wii had been that, the Game Boy Advance had been that before. The Game Boy had been that. But the 3DS was going to be their first handheld system that was a flop. And that's kind of monumental. You know, like Nintendo, whatever else they do, you can always be sure.

that they had some sort of rock solid portable system that they dominated the portable space, maybe not technologically, but in terms of content, in terms of releases and volumes, and just in terms of playability.

And the 3DS was not delivering on that. So, they did something unprecedented. And in August of 2011, just how many months is that? That's six months, almost exactly to the day. Six months after the systems launch in Japan, they announced a lot of

things. They said, hey, $250. That's a lot, huh? We're going to drop the price to $170. And sorry about those of you who bought the system and paid $80 more than you should have. But to make it up to you, we're going to create the ambassador program. And your $80 is worth 10 NES games and 10 Game Boy advanced games. So that's $8 a game. I don't know how the pricing on that works out. But the GBA games did end up being exclusive to ambassadors, mainly because there's this kind of weird hardware thing they have to do to make the Game Boy Advance games work. So if I'm not mistaken, if I'm understanding this correctly, the 3DS, you know, was built on the base of the DS. Like the the DS tech was built into the 3DS.

That's how it had backward compatibility and how it was able to basically be like an upgraded DS. So when you play a DS game, it just boots into like the DS mode. And the DS mode obviously had hardware backward compatibility with Game Boy Advance. So basically, the Game Boy Advance virtual console was tricking the 3DS into thinking

it was a DS playing a game in slot 2. So that's cool that they could do that. It was a really impressive hack. But at the same time, it cut off access to all system-level stuff that was, you know, kind of built into 3D. And of course, you lost access to the system-level stuff with DS. But DS was built, you know, to be a portable system in this form factor. So when you closed the DS, you know, the 3DS, when it was playing a DS game, it would still go to sleep. the system thought, oh, I'm a DS. I should go to sleep now. But the DS did not have that sleep mode

for Game Boy Advance Games. So when you are using a 3DS that thinks it's a DS, that thinks it's a GBA, it's, it gets kind of confused. And so, you know, you close the lid and it doesn't put the Game Boy Advance Games to sleep. And it's just kind of, you know, it's basically a bridge too far for Nintendo. So I don't think they ever really serious. I seriously revisited it because they couldn't think of a way to make it work. And I don't know that, you know, I guess the new 3DS does still have that hardware compatibility mode built into it because the ambassador games could be carried forward, but they just, I guess, couldn't get it to work or they didn't care to get it to work to, you know, put a GBA virtual

console on 3DS. So it's, it's so strange that the WiiU is the only Nintendo system to have a virtual console for the DS and the Game Boy Advance. I'm happy it's there, but I think that's one of the many missed opportunities the 3DS had, was allowing you to buy and download those games. Right. And I think that is because to be able to use those games, you had to go into the hardware compatibility mode, and they just couldn't get the, you know, the virtual console wrapper or the metadata, you know, the shell to work correctly when it was kicking into that backward compatibility hardware mode.

So just a kind of weird limitation of the system and the design. So the fact that you can play WarioLand 4 or Metroid Fusion on a new 2DS Excel, if you happen to have bought a 3DS within the first six months of his life, that's kind of neat. But it's also kind of pointless. So Diamond, were you an ambassador? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I bought the system at launch.

Yeah, each time I bought a new console version, I had to, like, do this very strange arcane process of sending the data from one machine to the other. It's well-animated. It's adorable. The little, like, little characters run over and take your data to the other system. But it takes a long time. So I think that's probably one more reason I never invested in a new 3DS or 2DS because I didn't want to go through all that data transfer again. But, yes, in theory, if I were to buy one and get the data off this golden. Zelda 3DS that I have, it would still have all my ambassador games, and I'm guessing that the

GBA games would still be wonky as heck. But it was nice to have them. And I guess we should also highlight that by this point, the virtual console was already open on 3DS. So they were clearly trying to get people excited about this. And they, I believe they already put out, you know, some Game Boy games on virtual console, which, you know, we never had. So it was kind of, you know, they were definitely breaking new ground. Like, oh, look, virtual console doesn't have to be just, you know, games from the 80s, they can be games from the 90s, because I think they,

I think they opened with, um, Zelda, Lynx Awakening. Yeah, yeah. So, um, initially the virtual console on 3DS was just Game Boy, Game Boy Color.

Then, um, there were Game Gear games that were ported by M2 and really kind of put Nintendo's virtual console stuff to shame. Because M2, you know, they always put so much love into their projects. So the,

the, the game gear, virtual console games are just so much richer and so much more, you know, loaded with features and options than the Game Boy and Game Boy Color stuff. It's kind of weird, but I don't think anyone bought them. So game, you know, there were only a few Game Gear games released for virtual console. But it took a while for them to bring NES games to virtual console, like a year. It was a long time. It was just Game Boy, Game Boy Color for a long time. And then I feel like there was something else. Oh, yeah, there were the 3D ages, 3D classics. I can't

remember what it was called, but Aureka worked with Nintendo to port a bunch of, you know, 8-bit games, NES games, like 8 of them or a dozen or something, to 3DS and give them 3D enhancements. So they were mostly like early games. I think Urban Champion was one of them because, of course, of course it was. Zevius was on there, which was actually kind of cool because Zevius is a game where you are a spaceship flying over the ground and you have aerial enemies and you have ground-based enemies. So it was actually a really natural fit. But according to the programmer, it was really hard to make that happen. And then there were just a couple of more advanced games. One of them was Kirby's Adventure, which... Yeah, that's a great enhancement of that game.

Yeah, it was, it's like all these, you know, black box NES games and then the most technical advanced NES game that Nintendo ever published. Just kind of the extremes there, the antipities. If I recall correctly, like some of these games, you couldn't just buy them. They were like pre-order incentives or they were special like gifts you had to get through a certain way. Like a lot of them weren't just available digitally through the storefront. I think the only one that was the case for was Kid Icarus.

Okay. And I think eventually you could buy Kidacris because I ended up with it and I did not buy. I have it for some reason and I don't know how. But Kinney Chris was one of those where they actually tweaked the game just a little bit. They tweaked the jump physics and it is like a 50% more playable game than the original

NES game. It's more fun. It's just a better experience. But you know, for the most part they just kind of brought these like Urban Champion type games over and we're like, hey look a shadow box effect. Hooray! But Kiddikers, you know, they actually tweak the gameplay. The ExciteBite port I think had something very

special. I think you could actually adjust a 3D slider and like see more of the crowd. somehow? That was one that had a lot of work put into it. I think each of them had a fair amount of work put into them because it wasn't just like, hey, let's turn the sprites into voxels or something. They actually had to sit down and handcraft how these worked, which is why we only got eight of them or so because they were very labor intensive and I don't think they sold all that well. But it was a neat little thing that ended it was doing to be like, hey, look, here's how 3D works for our legacy

catalog too. Although ironically, they didn't publish, you know, 3D Hot Rally or any of the games that actually did have 3D originally, which is kind of weird. There were no virtual boy virtual console games, which is just like, why? Why not? What were you guys thinking? Anyway, so yeah, that's Nintendo 3DS. Oh, one game I wanted to spotlight, just it's a really interesting game that I think was the last real stumbling block before the 3DS really took off. And I don't know if either of you have any comment on it, but it's a Kid I occurs uprising, where I feel that that was a lot of the stubbornness Nintendo had to get over where it was a game that I feel had like great production values, great music, great localization, and genuinely good

game design, but the interface was so bad and physically painful that even with the built-in 3DS easel they give you to play it, it is still just a game that is unapproachable for most people. I played it before I entered my 30s, like it came out right before I turned 30, and it left me in such pain that I never touched it again, like right after release. And I feel like Nintendo had a lot of getting over themselves to do before they were able to make the 3DS a success. And I think that was the last real stumbling block before that happened. Yeah, I could definitely see that.

I do think that, you know, the sort of 3DS triage that they did was Nintendo being unusually humble and saying, hey, we messed up. And I feel like that was the kind of thing that you only really ever saw under Iwada. like he was the kind of guy who would say you know we didn't hit our goals this year and as president I feel responsible for that so I'm not taking a salary it was kind of a very brief little period of a sort of enlightened Nintendo

and you know it really worked for them like that attempt to salvage the 3DS's fortunes actually did salvage the fortunes like the sales increased by they more than doubled Between September and December of 2011, you know, in the first six months, it had sold six million units worldwide. And within the next three months, it sold another nine million units. That's very impressive. And that was enough, I think, to really give the 3DS great

traction before the Vitas launch. Like, you know, when you have 15 million units in the channel, in the marketplace installed, you know, with people playing and using, it gives you good footing against a rival competitor, a rival system. And ultimately, the 3DS has sold 75 million units worldwide. So that's a big improvement from a system that was already starting to kind of fade away after the initial launch. And it's a very rare example of a company putting its full way behind a product that didn't seem to be doing well and saying, no, we're going to make this a success. You just don't really see that too often. Usually people, you know, look at Vita. Like Sony could have done a lot with Vita. They could have done what Nintendo did and said, we're going to put our full way behind

this. We're going to make this work. But instead they just said, hey, you know, we've got PlayStation 4. That's good enough. We don't care about the Vita. They tried Vita TV. I have a Vita TV. I've used it at work. It's helpful. Well, thankfully, this global depression is good for the switch and good for Nintendo. Yes, somehow. I think the way it's keeping everyone inside, it makes us we have to find something, even if we're poor, just rack up the debt and buy a switch and wait for all to blow over. Well, I mean, definitely the, you know, the timing of Animal Crossing was totally coincidental, but it couldn't have been better. Like, coming out just as people were being shut inside, you know, I mentioned that my switch, my launch switch has become an Animal Crossing machine. And my wife does not play video games. She just

doesn't. But, you know, her job is to be a photographer. And that involves going out on locations and shooting. And for like three months, she could not do that at all. And so she was cooped up in the house. We weren't seeing anyone. It was just me and her. And, you know, as charming and wonderful as I am, it's just not enough to, you know, to be a totally satisfying 24-hour companion, especially when I had to work harder than ever to make up for the income she wasn't bringing in. So Animal Crossing was her kind of social channel and she made lots of friends online and would just go out and be like, hey, I'm going to go, you know, give stuff to people and I'm going to go trade stuff with people. And I'm going to just, you know, visit people's islands and see what they're doing and be inspired

and let them come to my island and I'll give them stuff. And it was this kind of substitute social experience that, you know, people couldn't have for that period. So yeah, it was, definitely, I don't know where I'm going with this. Just Switch has definitely fared better than 3DS right from the outset. You know, I'm starting to think that the release of Animal Crossing and the spread of COVID-19 is no coincidence. And we need to investigate Nintendo. Yes. Why isn't Congress talking about this?

They're too busy taking away our $2,000. That can buy several switches. Yeah. If only, thanks for nothing, McConnell. So I don't think we really have enough time to talk about the library in depth. Maybe that's another episode down the road. I would like to finish out this episode just asking each of you, what is your favorite 3DS memory?

Like when you look back at the system and think, oh, 3DS, what is it that makes you think that? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that one year at TGS I actually left mine sitting out somewhere in a, just on a, desk and I was really, I freaked out about it and then I discovered that, in fact, it had been returned to the loss and found. So that was a wonderful surprise that I think is an only in Japan moment that someone found a new 3DS sitting, or not a new 3DS, but a new 3DS, just sitting out there and instead of taking it, which they could have, they brought it to the office

and said, oh, here, someone lost this and I got it back. So I was really happy about that. But as far as games go, I think I just really liked how it slowly started integrating all this stuff that, you know, I had expected. I never really messed around with virtual console much on Wii, but here it was in a portable form, you know, getting games that had previously only been available at home consoles were now portable. I enjoyed that factor. I mean, the 3D, I don't think I stuck with a 3D that long, but, you know, everyone's why I would turn it on. And, you know, when it worked it was kind of magical even if after

I think about 20 minutes my eyes said yeah I'm good but I just really appreciated the variety of stuff that once it got over that hurdle and people agreed that it was good you got a lot of things you got a lot of digital only games you know I think that was definitely

Nintendo's first chance to say oh you know what we will sell games physically and we'll sell them digitally and I think it was during the 3DS time where they announced that oh everything will be digital now or at least there'll be a digital option as well as physical. And, you know, I mean, there are some franchises that their last hurrah was on 3DS. If we have more time, I'd love to talk about what my favorite game on 3DS was,

which was Slime Morning Morty Dragon Quest 3. It hasn't been one since. Yeah, for me, I mentioned it earlier, but it was, you know, moving to the Bay Area, working in the games press full time, thinking, oh, I've got it made in the shade, a job at a website. How could that possibly go wrong ever? Websites will be around forever, including one-up. But just associating it with that time period and being excited and not jaded at all about that industry, that is a happy memory for me.

And then all the time I was unemployed right after that, the 3DS was there for me even when I wasn't reviewing games. Yeah, so I don't know, I'm looking over the games and everything. There's so many great games on 3DS, but I feel like my favorite general memory of the 3DS, is just that early period where one-up was shut down, and that wasn't good. Wait, that's a fond memory for you? Well, no, no. That part sucked. But then U.S. Gamer was like, hey, we're starting this website.

Come right for us. And I said, okay, but I don't want to be like the editor. I hate management, and it sucks. Please don't make me do that. And they said, no, no, just come right for us. And I said, oh, I can do that. So there was like a six-month period where I just went to U.S. gamer and I didn't have to be the management. I just wrote. And the 3DS was there full of these

interesting games for me to write about stuff like Shin Magame Tensei 4 and Animal Crossing. Like some of the best writing I've ever done about video games was in that little period. And it was about 3DS games because it was basically just people saying, hey, we're going to give you a salary to just write some stuff about games, make it interesting and make it unique. And I did. And it just really, like, it was an opportunity for me to really sit down with these games and say, you know, what's interesting about these games? What really speaks to me? How can I convey that? And I really, really enjoyed that. And then, you know, after six months, they were like, hey, you should actually be editor-in-chief. And I said, no. And they said, yes, or you can go find another job. And I said, oh, okay. And I didn't get to write as much. And that sucked. But, you know, I enjoyed the period where I got to do my my dream job, which is just like piss off and write about video games that only I care about, who cares, that's great.

So I'm glad I got to, you know, enjoy that dream for a little while. And the 3DS was there for me too. It was great. All right. So, yeah, we've talked for more than an hour and a half at this point. So I think that is a full-fledged podcast,

a full-sized podcast, not a little dinky half podcast, the real thing. I want to do part two. Yeah, I absolutely agree. We have to do part two. There are so many great games on 3DS. Like, I'm looking at this list that we all put together.

And there are some of these games I could talk about for an hour on their own. And maybe we will. So, yes, let's reconvene some time later this year. And maybe we can do an episode to celebrate 3DS's triage in August. Like the part where the system went from being imminent failure to, full-fledged success. So this is the ambassador edition?

Yes, this is the ambassador podcast. We'll do the mass release podcast later. If you listen to this podcast, you get a special certificate. Which you can trade to play an NES game. I don't know. Anyway, it's got to be Yoshi.

Thank you both, Diamond and Bob, for joining me for this journey down memory lane. Thanks everyone who has listened to this episode. This has been Retronauts. And I believe this is a public release episode. So you know what that means?

That's right. It's time for some plugs. Yes, Retronauts is brought to you by you. You, the listener. Can go to patreon.com slash retronauts and support the show for a few bucks a month. You get to listen to every episode a week in advance and a higher bit rate quality than you will hear on the public feed

and without any advertisements or cross promotions. If you pay a little more than that, you also get bonus stuff, including podcasts every other Friday that are unique, exclusive to the Patreon feed. And also every single weekend, you get a column and a mini podcast from Diamond right here, who has just jumped in and told us all about S&K games and many other things over the past year. Very happy to do that. Yeah, no, your work's been great. Thanks again for contributing so much, but we've been doing this Patreon exclusive stuff for more than a year now, and there is a ton of stuff. So if you go to patreon.com slash Retronauts, you have literally a year's worth of podcast and written content to catch up on. It'll keep you busy for a while. You have access to all of that at $5 a month. So please consider it. There are also other Patreon tiers, but you know, you can check out the Patreon and see what you think. Anyway, that's a Enough of a plug for the show. Diamond, tell us where we can find out more about you and your work.

Well, individually, you can find me on Twitter at Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that's my last name, C-L-U-B, like the weapon or gathering. And if you're interested in just supporting me personally, I also have a Patreon and a K-Fi and those sort of things. It's a K-Fi or coffee? I don't know. I think it's coffee, yeah. Yeah. But, yeah, so you're welcome to support me personally, but, yeah, I've been very pleased this year to spend so much time working on Retronaut stuff. Besides the weekly column, which is Patreon exclusive, I also write a monthly collection of just video game-related kickstaters, which has been a really fun sort of grab bag of just what's going on. I really enjoyed that sort of stuff.

And, yeah, I'm out there. Nice to see you. Yes. All right. So finally, Bob. Hey everybody. You know me and I have another Patreon out there. It's called Talking Simpsons Patreon at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. We do two podcasts. That's Talking Simpsons, a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon where we look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. You can find those wherever you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. Sign up there for early access and also access to all of the miniseries we've done over the past over three years of that Patreon. There's over 100 bonus episodes and they're all waiting for you there. at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. And finally, for myself, Jeremy Parrish, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite,

and I sometimes post other social media, but not really that much. That's the main place. But you can also find me obeying my three masters. There's here at Retronauts. There's limited run games who gives me my health insurance, and therefore I love them, especially with the health issues I had last year. Boy, thank goodness for health insurance. If only we could have single pair.

And then finally there's the video project that I do called, I guess, video works. And as you listen to this, if you're on the public feed, next week I am starting a massive new endeavor, not massive new endeavor, but taking a really big sidebar to really dig into the contextual history of everything I've been doing for the past seven years with my videos and diving into the Sega SG 1000 and really covering this kind of like origin. of the gaming, you know, Sega gaming type stuff and also covering Famicom stuff in parallel as it was released with the Sega stuff. So it's kind of, I don't know, it's going to be a big project. I've already written one or two of the scripts and they're, it's been very interesting and I love, you know, kind of experimenting and exploring these vintage systems and games that people don't necessarily know a lot about in the U.S. It's all new. to me, and it's very exciting. So I hope you will please enjoy me, join me and enjoy what I

create. And in the meantime, I also have lots of stuff planned here on Retronauts for 2021 and also a limited run for 2021. I'm going to be doing a lot of stuff this year. So please join me on this journey. In the meantime, don't forget that you have your friend, the Nintendo 3DS. It's still there. It's still full of really great games. They are still really enjoyable, and you can go back and revisit them anytime, maybe even catch a street pass. Next time you see me, bring your 3DS, and I will help you beat Find Me. That's my promise to you, the listener of Retronauts. Thanks again for listening, and we'll be back in probably a few days with a bonus episode, is my guess. That's right. Take care. Good night.

We're going to be able to be. Thank you.