Nintendo 3DS

[Roderick]

Watched it, and I was indeed puzzled at the approach of unifying the moneys. The real issue is tying the software to the machine instead of an account online. Perhaps Nintendo are working on this behind the screens, and who knows what technical nightmares lie behind such a switch. I do hope they'll make it happen this generation, 'cause I'm investing heavily in digital 3DS releases. Not to mention the fear of losing or breaking my handheld, at which point there's nothing to prove that I purchased anything. It's not an ideal situation and Nintendo need to address it.

Bill Trinen did his best Mr. Rogers though. It felt as if the guy had a sore jaw from smiling at the end.

[colinp]

What exactly is Miiverse and why should I be happy it's coming to the 3DS?

[tegan]

What exactly is Miiverse and why should I be happy it's coming to the 3DS?

 

Miiverse is a thing where every single game has a sort of tiny forum community/twitter feed. You can, at any time, post screencaps along with drawings or short messages and take a look at what others have done. I used it to chronicle a sequence breaking run in Super Metroid through screencaps and to help first-time players who were stuck on certain parts of the game, Jeremy Parish posted a billion fun little drawings as he was going through New Super Mario Bros. U, Masahiro Sakurai posts Smash Bros. development screenshots almost every day, etc. It sounds dumb, but it's actually pretty neat in practice.

 

Also if they ever roll out the update they promised ages ago we can get an Idle Thumbs community going on there.

[SecretAsianMan]

How long until that gets scrapped like Swapnote because it's full of penes and dirty messages?

[Twig]

It's heavily moderated, I believe, so that could never actually happen. Posts have to actually be approved, I think?

[Sno]

Yeah, Miiverse is heavily moderated.

[Yasawas]

I had no idea what Bravely Default was other than a terrible title but I fired the demo up there and apparently it's a really stunning looking JRPG that might be right up my street but I don't know yet because it's late and it explains itself really badly and I'll need to approach it in more of a mood to read things. The demo is separate from the game but you carry things over to the full release so I have a reason to persevere.

 

That little reel of eShop stuff they showed in the middle of the direct today looked promising on the whole, especially that football management thing, so much stuff I'd never heard of and I was pleased to see how many Wii U titles they had for us. Also I am proud of myself for turning off at the end when they showed Super Mario 3D World - no Shibata, you will not take the shine my Christmas day with your spoily videos no matter how politely you ask and how much I want to watch. Please understand.

[shammack]

I'm thinking of upgrading to an XL. Can anybody confirm whether the process of transferring stuff from one 3DS to another includes saves for downloaded games? I didn't buy the cartridge version of Animal Crossing and I want to make sure I won't lose my town. (I seem to recall that when I moved my DSiWare software to my 3DS, the saves didn't go with it.)

[Sno]

As i understand it, once the licenses are transferred, you just pop the SD card out of your old 3DS and pop it into the new one and resume as normal. No save data should be lost.

[shammack]

Cool, thanks.

[Sno]

I think if you do a full system transfer, it formats any memory at the target 3DS? So don't move your SD card over first? I think that was a thing i heard? People accidentally wiping out all their saves?

I'm not completely clear on all the details since i haven't done it myself.

[Roderick]

Today I was at an anime convention in the Netherlands and it was 3DS heaven. I kept raking in oodles of mii's, finishing all my puzzles, advancing heftily in Mii Quest and getting some good results in Mii Force. It's truly the greatest thing.

[TheLastBaron]

UI kind of wish I didn't buy the extra Mii plaza games because everything that isn't the puzzle one or Find Mii takes a while to clear.  When I was at Day of the Devs I had my 3DS and I didn't even bother clearing my queue so I just got 10 tags, but then games like Pokemon got like +70.  Is there a way to just not go through all the games?  I know sometimes if I haven't cleared everything it'll sometimes say  "There's some guys at your plaza gate, do you want to greet them?  Warning you won't be able to finish your games"  or something, but I don't know what causes that to happen, versus it just not tagging any new people.

[shammack]

Every time you go to the plaza gate, it will reset the tags. You don't have to play the games in between; you'll just miss the opportunity to use those Miis in them when you greet the next set.

[tabacco]

I think if you do a full system transfer, it formats any memory at the target 3DS? So don't move your SD card over first? I think that was a thing i heard? People accidentally wiping out all their saves?

I'm not completely clear on all the details since i haven't done it myself.

 

Yep, this. Just use the builtin transfer utility. Assuming you're using the stock SD card that came in the original 3DS, the one in the XL is bigger anyway.

[shammack]

Hmm... I'm using a 32 GB card, and I was planning on getting the XL Zelda bundle... but I think that just comes with a download code for the game, so I guess if I just use the transfer utility before doing anything else, I should be OK.

[tegan]

Heads up to anyone like me who's just been checking Nintendo Video every two months or so because Dinosaur Office is the only thing on it that doesn't make you want to claw your eyes out: Nintendo Video is actually good now! Bravest Warriors and Bee and Puppycat have both shown up on it recently, and there's this series of Wind Waker machinima shorts that Nintendo's been producing and putting on there.

 

 

Also, can anyone recommend some good DSiware/eshop games? For whatever reason I feel compelled to add more games to my 3DS lately.

[Sno]

For 3DS-native stuff, the Guild games are mostly wonderful. (Liberation Maiden, Attack of the Friday Monsters, Starship Damrey, and especially Crimson Shroud are all easy recommendations.) Tokyo Crash Mobs is Puzz Loop with insane FMV from the people who originally created Puzz Loop, i think it's pretty damn wonderful. The two Mighty Switch Force games are awesome. Also, Mutant Mudds and Gunman Clive. Nano Assault EX is pretty great too.

For the DSi, Mighty Milky Way is cool. (Mighty Flip Champs is alright too.) X-scape is a phenomenally slick Battlezone-like that way more people need to play. Dark Void Zero is also really rad. (No, really!) Metal Torrent is a rad little bullet hell shmup with randomized stages. The DSi ArtStyle games are pretty neat too. (I like DigiDrive.)

[tegan]

Youtube is out as of today, if anybody's interested. The video quality is kind of butt, but otherwise it has no real problems.

[Sno]

So Bravely Default is apparently out in Europe in a few days, the critical response is quite positive, but it won't be out in North America until February. It was also just confirmed that Bravely Default will be getting a sequel.

 

In other 3DS-related news, the developer behind Rune Factory 4 apparently just closed down, which is a sad turn of events. RF4 is an excellent, excellent game, it's unfortunate that it will end up being that team's last.

I had picked it up when it was new, but kind of put it on the back burner almost right away. I've been spending more time with it again, and it's really just a fantastic game. It tries to be so many different things all at once and succeeds quite admirably.

[dartmonkey]

Sega 3D Classics are coming out two per week. I downloaded Space Harrier last week and I'll be getting Sonic later today. They're great updates and well worth supporting - there's some interviews with M2 up on the Sega blog with interesting insights into projects and the issues they faced.

 

http://blogs.sega.com/2013/12/03/sega-3d-classics-%E2%80%93-3d-sonic-the-hedgehog-interview-with-developer-m2/

 

http://blogs.sega.com/2013/11/27/sega-3d-classics-%E2%80%93-3d-super-hang-on-interview-with-developer-m2/

 

http://blogs.sega.com/2013/11/25/sega-3d-classics-space-harrier-3d-interview-with-developer-m2/

[Yasawas]

I bought Sonic last week and am having a great time with it, what they've put out for £4 thoroughly shames Nintendo and their lazy Virtual Console releases. I hope they do the sequels the same way.

 

I've put two hours into Bravely Default so far and it's pretty fantastic. Starts off as a standard JRPG, albeit a very pretty one, but it chucks so many interesting mechanics at you very quickly that when I started to get my head around the strategic possibilities in combat I went actively looking for fights to mess about with stuff which is a first for me. The StreetPass integration looks rad too if I'm understanding it right, and it even pulls random folk from the internet in their place so if you live in an area where you don't get any passes you can still make use of it. The voice acting is appalling but you can't have everything and Japanese is only a button-press away.

 

Speaking of StreetPass this most recent update to the relay service to give you the most recent six people to have passed the same point is so broken here it's annoying me. I frequently get all English people now which seems unlikely, and never the same one twice. I'd rather have had the same five hardcore 3DS commuter bros every day than 10 randoms from across the border but I suppose they've got to sell those additional StreetPass games somehow.

[dartmonkey]

Yep, Sonic is a very nice job. Slight disappointment at no widescreen mode (as opposed to the updated iOS version by Christian Whitehead), but the whole 3D package is great. Reading that M2 interview, it's weird that ports from hardware this old are so challenging. It reminds me of the Iwata Asks when they were discussing the difficulties of getting lag-free Wii Sports Tennis for the new Wii U version. Really? Twitch based shooters rarely have lag problems nowadays, and Wii Sports is hardly juggling polys. Of course I defer to the experts, and with different architectures and hardware iterations, etc, it must be a nightmare, but as a layman it sounds odd, especially with Sonic where the host hardware is nearly 25 years old!

 

I downloaded Miiverse for my 3DS this morning. Of course 'dartmonkey' was taken, so I am 'thedartmonkey' - add me if you fancy. Or follow me. Whatever the system is. The interface is a little confusing and it takes a while for pages to load, but I've never used the Wii U version so I don't really understand what it's all about. I'll noodle about on it a bit more later.

Regarding online handles, I recently exorcised a niggling OCD thing when I registered another PSN account. I set up the original within the last year and I'd only downloaded Flower and Journey to it. 'dartmonkey' was taken and I'd opted for 'dartmonkey_' as an alternative. But in the meantime I'd opened a Steam account as 'thedartmonkey' and ever since that underscore had been eating away at me. A couple of weeks ago I gave in to myself and now have account parity with 'dartmonkey'/'thedartmonkey'. I'm irritated that I'm THAT guy, and I've lost my license to play Flower, but goddamnit I feel better.

 

Sorry. Back to 3DS.

[colinp]

I don't know what the fuss about Miiverse is. Does do an accurate job of reminding me how shitty surfing the internet was twenty years ago when it took forever to load a web page on dial up, and slowly moving around memory intensive apps... Yay Nintendo?

Really jealous of EU's access to Bravely Default. I really really really can't wait to play it!

[Yasawas]

My Twitter name has an underscore on the end and it eats away at me every day.

Miiverse is a thing on 3DS now and it works and that's cool. It's easy to be cynical about it but I love it because it's great to be able to play a game and notice a thing and post it to the great unwashed and receive nothing but positivity and joy back in reply. Nintendo should moderate the entire internet. It's also really good when you get stuck or don't understand something and I've received a lot of assistance from random dudes in the Monster Hunter community with a lot less bullshit, elitism and arrogance than you'd find in most other places online where I could ask the same. Give it a chance.

Also I did the update first thing this morning and skimmed all the text but did I see you need a NNID to use the eShop now? Meaning they have no excuse not to tie your purchases to it now like they used to when it was your Club Nintendo account? I know it's not implemented yet but joyfully that's a hint they'll do it.