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Looks like it's finally time to grab all those games I held off on grabbing because my backlog was already extraordinary, lest I have to find them in a couple years on eBay at wildly inflated prices.
It's not perfect, but tons of games are fully playable and development is still very active.
I'm nearly blind in one eye. The 3DS XL was the first time I ever saw 3D. In my life. I don't just mean "the first time I saw a stereoscopic 3D effect in movies or a game console." It was the first time I ever saw in three dimensions ever. As a human being. It's a little bit hard to describe my typical experience with you, since I've never had "normal" version and I don't know what it's like. I would compare my life…
Not a brainologist either, just a guy with a maths/physics degree who works in IT. My first thought is that the 3DS was close enough to your face that the parallax might have been apparent just from your one good eye looking at different places on the screen.
Looks like it's finally time to grab all those games I held off on grabbing because my backlog was already extraordinary, lest I have to find them in a couple years on eBay at wildly inflated prices.
For example, Pokemon Platinum, is selling used for about 120-150.
This is like when someone like Gerald Ford dies and I say, "Wow. I could have sworn Gerald Ford died 8 years ago."
seriously?! I just bought one now after putting it off for years
As long as you can get them all for decent prices, I don't think there's much to regret, because if they're using any of the 3DS exclusive capabilities, you're not going to be able to reproduce the experience on any other console anyways.
Nintendo insisted that the 3DS was not being replaced by the switch, in the same way that they told me that the game boy line would keep going after the DS began. Something tells me this is Nintendo hedging bets
• Did you know that the SNES’s CPU starts up in a “NES 6502 compatibility” mode, sort of like x86-64 processors starting up in 16-bit real mode? It’s fully possible to design and build a game entirely for the NES as a 6502-assembler codebase; and then to “port” the game to the SNES, by taking that very same 6502-assembler codebase, and just adding a few minor SNES-level “enhancements” that temporarily switch to 65c816 mode, do something, then switch back to 6502 mode. Since the market penetration of the NES was so high, many games in the early 90s were “dual-released” this way.
• Did you know it was possible to create a GBC cart that would act as a fully-fledged SNES game (i.e. mapping a separate SNES game ROM) when plugged into a SNES through a Super Gameboy? Or to have “progressive enhancement” logic in the GBC ROM itself that draws full-color sprites (OBJs) when played on a Super Gameboy? AFAIK, literally nobody has ever fully exploited this, not even demoscene devs.
But, well, third-party devs just seemingly have no interest in releasing for old platforms. They want to “be where the action is.” And Nintendo can’t carry the momentum of a platform all by itself. (Plus, Nintendo’s software dev-teams are too busy acting as stewards and shepherds for how to make use of the newest-gen hardware capabilities — by making games for them, and by interfacing with third-parties — to have any labor left over for making games for older consoles.)
That being said, Nintendo did try to keep the gameboy line going after the DS. They released the GB Micro. It was its whole own thing, with its own product code (OXY) that signalled that they had likely built up separate factories just to build it. But basically nobody bought it.
(But really, I think Nintendo was speaking to developers there, not to gamers. They meant that there’d still be a point, as a game studio, in producing GBA games, because the DS would also play them.)
I am mostly thinking about Pokémon. They’ve got this rich new Pokémon Home system to transfer between generations, but that’s reliant on having functioning older hardware. Now, there’s a massive pool of functional 3DS systems out there, so it’s not a pressing issue, but eventually, some poor Ash Greninja will be trapped on a 3DS cartridge. (I suppose the answer is: port all the Pokémon games, profit, swim in giant Scrooge McDuck moneybin of coins.)
seriously?! I just bought one now after putting it off for years
There are cartridges which allow you to load games onto a micro SD card. They can be used to load homebrew games or roms obtained from less than legal means. I had one for the original DS and obtained ROMs for the cartridges that I owned. It was convenient to have them all in one place when traveling without having to bring a bunch of cartridges with me.
Nintendo insisted that the 3DS was not being replaced by the switch, in the same way that they told me that the game boy line would keep going after the DS began. Something tells me this is Nintendo hedging bets