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Fixed that for you: 10 ways to make the 3DS king
Nintendo’s latest handheld is great, but three years on there’s still work to be done.
Fixed that for you: 10 ways to make the 3DS king
© hkdmz/Flickr
When it comes to handhelds, no one does it better than Nintendo, which practically created the entire gaming-on-the-go concept with the Game Boy back in 1989. That legacy still holds true today thanks to the Japanese gaming giant’s latest handheld, the Nintendo 3DS, which launched in 2011 and has grown at a steady rate into one of the best consoles available today. It’s a solid handheld which has built on the success of the original, money-printing DS, but it’s still not perfect. With the technologically superior PlayStation Vita practically on the ropes, here’s how we’d fix up the 3DS to deliver the TKO blow to Sony’s ailing handheld, and joy to gamers around the globe.
Game Boy Advance games
We love our 3DS, but its backward compatibility could be a lot better. Sure, it plays DS cartridges, but we’d love to see some actual Game Boy Advance titles on the Virtual Console already. We’re puzzled as why Nintendo still hasn’t launched one, even though the Ambassador program which launched near the start of the console’s life managed to dish out 10 GBA games to early adopters of the console. In other words, most 3DS gamers are left on the wrong side of the velvet rope, gawping on jealously, and for no reason. It’s the perfect console to relive classic titles like Metroid Fusion and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap on, but instead of giving us more portable games to play on our portable console, Nintendo has elected to launch GBA games on the Wii U instead. Baffling.
A new model with the Circle Pad Pro built-in
Ever played Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance, Metal Gear Solid 3D: Snake Eater or Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate on the 3DS without the Circle Pad Pro add-on? Controlling the games without the monstrous add-on is practically murder for your hands, as using the camera in each of those titles is next to impossible. We’d love for Nintendo to launch a Nintendo 3DS Pro version with twin circle pads to make full-3D games even easier to control, and it could even help bring in a wealth of new titles to the handheld. It might alienate out gamers with older consoles, but isn’t it about time for a next-gen portable Nintendo system anyway? We’d take Splatoon on the road every single day.
SNES Virtual Console – Come on!
We can almost forgive Nintendo for a lack of GBA games on the 3DS Virtual Console, but you know what’s totally unforgivable? Zero SNES titles. The 3DS is the perfect handheld for kicking back with 90s classics like Super Metroid, Rare’s Donkey Kong series and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, right down to the identical controls, and we’re astonished this hasn’t happened yet. The original DS printed money for Nintendo, but with GBA or SNES titles on the 3DS Virtual Console, the company’s latest handheld could make it rain from the skies. A no brainer, for sure – all Nintendo needs to do is whip up a quick emulator and watch it pour.
Battery life boost
For gaming at home, the supersized 3DS XL is one of the best handhelds to chill out with on the couch, thanks to its massive screens and lengthy battery life. The original 3DS though? Great for taking on the go – but its battery life needs a serious boost. We have fond memories of the DS Lite lasting for nearly a week in sleep mode, letting us just sling it our bag and forget about it from time to time, but you’ll be lucky if your 3DS lasts three days in the same sleep mode – not to mention when you’re actually gaming. For a portable, the 3DS has a horrendous battery life, and we’d love to see it given more juice to really give it the killer edge over its PlayStation rival.
Nintendo 3DS XL: Extra large screens, extra small resolution
Nintendo’s oversized handheld, the 3DS XL, is brilliant. What’s not brilliant is the screen. You’ll find the size much bigger, yes, but the resolution hasn’t been touched at all, meaning you won’t have a better quality image. Aliasing and low-resolution textures are much more noticeable, making your favourite games seem a lot more ugly than they should be. It’s still a great system that’s much more capable of immersing you in your games, but to really make the grade, we want the 3DS XL’s screen resolution to be bumped up – all for the health of our eyes.
eShop – less daylight robbery, please
Nintendo’s eShop is brilliant for getting hold of boxed games straight on your system without having to head down the shop or wait for the postman to deliver it – but you really do pay an arm and a leg for the convenience. Nintendo’s pricing is ridiculous, with many top titles available to digitally purchase for around the cost of a kidney, or at least more than their boxed equivalents. We want to see better, more regular offers, and games with a Gold/PlayStation Plus-style reward program that grants you classic games for free with your subscription. It’d be a win-win for everyone.
Head to the cloud – 3DS/Wii U cross-platform play
If you’ve got both of Nintendo’s latest consoles – the 3DS and the Wii U – you might wish that they did more together instead of being separate entities. We’d love to see Nintendo take a page out of Sony’s book and give you cross-platform play between the two systems, as we can see that going down a treat for the upcoming Super Smash Bros. title. It would have also been perfect for Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, plus a game like Shovel Knight would benefit greatly from cloud-based saves for both consoles, letting you pick-up and play from where you left off on your 3DS. C’mon Nintendo, make it happen!
Ditch the 3D, for good
Let’s be honest for a moment. From the moment you unboxed your 3DS, your 3D slider has never been moved from its lowest position, right? The killer feature that Nintendo was proud to proclaim with its handheld is all filler and has zero practical uses, which is why it needs to be ditched for good. Switching on the 3D drops the frame-rate of your favourite game down a notch, and the stereoscopic effect is hard to truly appreciate when you’re gaming on the go, as the slightest motion can throw you out of the field of view. The recent 2DS is a step in the right direction – but its cheese wedge shape leaves much to be desired, as all we really want is a super-slim clamshell redesign that ditches the useless 3D and lets us actually fit the console in our pocket. We’re not alone, right?
Does anyone use the camera?
Along with the 3D effect, Nintendo strapped a duo of cameras onto its handheld to snap photos in stereoscopic 3D too – but we can’t remember the last time we actually used them. The DSi started the trend of a built-in camera into the system, and the idea dates back to the Game Boy Camera, but with the quality almost non-existent, we’re wondering why Nintendo hasn’t left the idea in the past already. The only thing that’d get us snapping with our handhelds is if there was a Game Boy Camera filter thrown in, but even that would get tiring.
Operating system update
If there’s one thing that modern smartphones have spoiled us with compared to the 3DS, it’s speed. We’re able to flick through menus, apps and games at a rapid pace on the phone in our pocket, while we’re sat waiting around for our games to freeze after hitting the Home button to finally check out a StreetPass notification. Multitasking also needs to work better, as we’re tired of having to close down a game just to tweak a setting, or if we want to see our pedometer stats, while we could do with more apps for beaming down video. With modern phones having much more functionality than our 3DS, we can see why more and more people are gaming on their phones instead – meaning Nintendo needs to step it up in the mobile space even more.
What would you change about the Nintendo 3DS? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments below...
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