Nintendo 3DS

[Sno]

Rather conveniently, Nano Assault EX just went on sale. (Alongside a few other things like Pushmo and Tokyo Crash Mobs.)

The Guild 01 stuff will also apparently remain on sale for another week.

Edit: Just confirmed it myself. The list of deals hasn't been updated yet, but the things that should be on it do have a reduced price. (NA:EX is 10 bucks instead of 15.)

[Roderick]

Ah, excellent!

[Tanukitsune]

It looks like the Lego City Undercover now has a port or side game for the 3DS, which is great since I love LEGO games and I don't want to buy a Wii U yet.

[tegan]

So that weird life sim thing Tomodachi Collection for the 3DS is remarkably progressive in that you can have two male characters have a relationship, up to and including getting married and having children together.

 

Nintendo's response: "that's a bug and we're patching it out."

 

Booooooo.

 

[Sno]

I just transferred the contents of my fully-loaded 3DS over to a new 32GB (class 6) card and it seems to be working fine. Swapnote loads like five times as fast, it's kind of nuts, and I have over 220 thousand memory blocks to play around with. (I had been using the pack-in SD card until now.)

I did a lot of research to figure out what an ideal SD card would be, and the only conclusion i came to was that SD cards are totally fucked. I saw some of you guys asking about SD cards a while ago, so let me share my findings:

Speed classes are virtually meaningless and sometimes even contrary to smooth operation in software applications, and the 3DS has a ton of fidgety, weird behaviors with newer, larger cards.

As a general rule of thumb, based on my findings, you want to avoid anything over 32 GB's, and anything above a Class 10 card. (So SD and SDHC and no UHS cards.)

A class 10 card is not necessarily better than a lower class, since the faster ones are optimized for writing HD video in a linear fashion. Because of those specific optimizations, they may actually be slower for the kind of random access that goes on in normal software applications.

Depending on how you format it, you can apparently cause other problems too. (FAT32 and 32KB clusters seems to be the accepted settings. Nintendo's site advises using the SD association's custom formating tool.)

[Roderick]

That's interesting! Would you say class 6 is ideal? What class is the standard SD card? And how much did you pay for it? Over here, SD cards of 32GB are still easily 35 euros, which is steep in my book.

[Sno]

It's hard to say, there seems to be very little standardization from product to product, the "class" rating ended up seeming almost completely worthless. It appears to have been established around a very narrow use case of recording HD video, and so performance varies wildly in other applications.

I was looking for a clear answer and couldn't find one. I saw reports of class 2 cards inexplicably being faster for software applications than class 10 cards, since the latter are so specialized. Talk about a confusing, counter-productive set of standards.

 

I mean, and anything over 2GB's is apparently not even officially supported by Nintendo, it seems like the 3DS was only designed with the original SD standard in mind. (So FAT16 and a 2 gig limit, which is exactly the card the 3DS ships with.)

I honestly went with this particular class 6 card since it was relatively cheap, apparently reliable, and because it seemed like an appropriate performance median. (I paid thirty bucks canadian.)

So yeah, even after looking into it a bunch, i still ended up just kind of winging it.

[tegan]

The XL ships with a 4GB card.

 

Is there maybe a list of the best cards to get for the 3DS somewhere? I might upgrade to a higher-capacity card as games that I'll want on my system forever keep coming out (Pokémon, Animal Crossing, etc).

[Roderick]

Oh, by the way, I am STOKED to start playing Animal Crossing in a month from now. It'll be easily five years since I had a blast with Wild World.

[Sno]

I've toyed around with the idea of checking in with my Wild World town, but i don't think i could bear the guilt of seeing what a catastrophe my town has turned into without me.

I'm really excited to start new with New Leaf, though.

[BigJKO]

Or maybe the town is doing fine without you and you'll be devastated..

[Roderick]

I'd love it if after five years, my entire Wild World town is now covered in a giant mutated plant who has developed a consciousness and which you must now beat to free the enslaved populace.

[Sno]

I have been motivated to load up my copy of Wild World and poke around.

I see a bunch of custom pixel art everywhere, a pretty swank, classy house filled with some of the limited goodies that were trickled out over time, and a friends list full of people i haven't spoken to in years.

I must have put a ton of time into this game.

I forgot how ambitiously online-focused Wild World was, relatively speaking of course, considering what little else Nintendo was doing at the time.

[tegan]

There's a Nintendo Direct focused on summer games for the Wii U and 3DS tomorrow! They're also saying they'll have another Nintendo Direct about autumn releases before E3.

[Roderick]

Let's see what craaaaazy features they've added to LttP this time!

Ha, kidding, I am looking forward to this. Hey, I also didn't realise that apparently the Starship Damrey is already out or close to release. Hot stuff. It's like the Gone Home of handhelds. Also, why didn't anyone tell me Swords & Soldiers was getting a 3D treatment? That is an EXCELLENT strategy game that will fit right on the system. I don't know if the conversion is solid, but if it is, that's the first thing I'll buy.

[Sno]

The next couple months are looking pretty crazy for the 3DS. Shin Megami Tensei IV, Mario & Luigi 4, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Rune Factory 4, and Project X Zone. Four of these upcoming things being RPG's in a year when the 3DS has already had Fire Emblem: Awakening, Etrian Odyssey IV, and Soul Hackers. Hell, and Bravely Default will probably end up being a 2013 3DS RPG for us too. So many RPGs.

Even more: Ace Attorney 5 was just confirmed for the west. (Only as a digital release, unfortunately, but at least it's happening. Now what about Ace Attorney vs Layton? Are we ever getting that?)

I don't think i could be more thrilled with how things are going on the 3DS.

Yeah, and Starship Damrey is out real soon, i think that looks like a pretty neat adventure game, and that Mario vs DK-themed Pipe Dream clone just came out too.

[Tanukitsune]

Yeah, I finally dusted off my 3DS for the LEGO City Undercover game, and soon I'll be getting Animal Crossing and Luigi's Mansion. I guess I can enter that special offer Nintendo has in Europe then for a free game? How bad is the 3DS Castlevania?

 

Rune Factory 4 is tempting, but I don't know if it will scratch the same "itch" the older Harvest Moon games do.

[Sno]

The Castlevania game, i thought the demo was totally fine for what it was, but it has inspired quite a lot of vitriolic backlash for being so unlike the Igarashi games.

[Roderick]

It took me about half an hour of going 'ugh, oh god, what is this, I don't even', before I started really appreciating the slow pacing, the mood, the fun of the game itself. I'll probably give the full Mirror of Fate a try at some point. It's absolutely no Igarashi Castlevania, but that's necessarily bad. It's a different thing.

[Squid Division]

Briefly looking at SMTIV, I'm kind of interested. I'd thought they and the Persona games were both set in modern day. From what I can tell it's a standard JRPG with a medieval/post apocalyptic setting? Are these games linked to each other or is it like Final Fantasy where they're independent?

[Sno]

Briefly looking at SMTIV, I'm kind of interested. I'd thought they and the Persona games were both set in modern day. From what I can tell it's a standard JRPG with a medieval/post apocalyptic setting? Are these games linked to each other or is it like Final Fantasy where they're independent?

 

I'm not an SMT guy, but i understand there to be a ton of different continuities in a ton of different sub-series.

[Sno]

Oh, hey. Starship Damrey is apparently out today.

[Roderick]

About SMT: it's not like a standard RPG, there's a whole Pokémonesque mechanic to it where you have to battle, catch, train and coax monsters to fight for you.

[Sno]

I also know that this will be the first main-series SMT game in a decade. (Though the DS's SMT: Strange Journey is apparently held to be an ancillary part of the main series.)

When i've heard people talk about SMT as a series, it's given the impression that the main-series games are significantly darker and more adult in tone than everything else, though the Persona games are by far the most popular. (With their emphasis on apparently well-written characters and relationship building.)

Having really only been a distant observer of the series for a long time, i'm curious about finally giving it a chance via the 3DS games. (Soul Hackers also sounds pretty cool to me, though as part of the Devil Summoner series, i guess it's much more of a dungeon crawler. It's also a remake of an old game that was originally never released outside of Japan. As a result, it's been criticzed somewhat for both being a bit dated and feeling like a bit of a slog.)

There's also those Devil Survivor games, the other currently relevant branch of SMT, which are just straight up strategy RPG's.

[Sno]

Starship Damrey.

I'm only about an hour and a half into it so far, but i think it's pretty rad. It will seem very familiar if you played any first-person point-and-click adventure games in the 90's, because it's very much that kind of game. I'm particularly reminded of the earlier Journeyman Project games, but Myst is the easiest and most familiar touchstone to grab for. As it happens, i love those kinds of games, so this is proving to be super, super appealing to me.