Why is the 3DS Popular Again?

the Nintendo 3DS is over 13 years old it's been discontinued for a few years now and even the online store and servers have been shut down so why is the system seen a sudden Resurgence in interest lately why do people care about this dinky little brick that may or may not be able to play Mario why is the 3DS popular again well today I'm going to give three reasons as to why I think the 3DS has seen a rise in popularity within the Nintendo space and why I think now more than ever is the best time to dust offy old system or do some eBay searching and play the Nintendo 3DS [Music] again last year in March of 2023 the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U officially shut down meaning you can no longer purchase or download software from those storefronts onto your system in addition as of April 8th of this year the online servers to play multiplayer games have also been shut down for both of these systems because these systems are about to be practically dead I mean as of right now they are it makes sense why people would want to start playing their 3DS again to play some of these games online before you can never do so again well that's not entirely true but we'll get to that later I have personally been playing a fair bit of Monster Hunter 4 ultimate recently because of the server shutting down so I can experience the multiplayer before it's too late there are so many great games that were lost during the eShop Purge and there are so many multiplayer games that won't be able to be played anymore at least not in their full capacity this news is disappoint pointing but at the very least it's gotone people talking about this system again people are looking back at the many years this console was active with fondness I know I am the 3DS was the first Nintendo console to have full retail Games available from an online storefront it had many apps like Netflix and YouTube that you could only dream of being able to use on the DS it had meerse a Nintendo social media platform that I and many others have fond memories of despite as flaws nowadays these features may seem unnecessary or unimpressive like why not just use Discord or Twitter to talk about Nintendo games Netflix and YouTube are on everything at this point except for the switch for some reason like seriously why does it not have Netflix but at the time all of this was revolutionary for a handheld and during the 3DS and Wii U era there was a much greater sense of community among players that hasn't really been replicated with the switch in my opinion this is a whole discussion for another video but in 2024 people want to relive those memories or see what this old console was like in its final moments however this news is not exclusive to the 3DS as the same thing is happening to the Wii U so why else have people been playing this 13-year-old handheld [Music] recently as I briefly touched on in the last Point people are starting to get nostalgic over the 3DS or at the very least people are looking back at this Gem of a system with fondness now that it's been a pretty long time since it was alive there are a ton of great games that went completely under the radar either either because they came out after the Nintendo switch or because they just weren't popular when they came out in general another thing is that people were tired of the dual screen gimmick by the time the Nintendo switch came around having two screens is a cool and useful feature but think about it between when the DS was released in 2004 and when the switch was released in 2017 there was a 133-year period where all of Nintendo's handheld games used this dual screen gimmick naturally people started to get tired of the dual screens especially since it was implemented into home consoles with the Wii U as well it was never a huge issue among fans at the time I mean the 3DS and Wii U had a plethora of other issues holding them back that had nothing to do with the two screens but it was clear that dual screen gaming had sort of run its course at least for right now then you have the Nintendo switch which was a runaway success now it's been a while since we've seen dual screen gaming and more people are starting to appreciate the benefits that it had on the games that used it well it's even gotten to the point where many people want to dual screen gaming continue with the Nintendo switch 2 or whatever it's going to be called I always thought this 3DS X concept video made when the switch was still called the NX was a cool idea though it would definitely have to be modernized to be released nowadays in my opinion the 3DS didn't receive the appreciation it deserved when it came out but now that time has passed people are starting to realize how great the system is not to mention that the switch is over 7 years old at this point and it's definitely on its way out there's not a lot coming out right now the only big things we've gotten from the switch from Nintendo this year are uh uh and uh but unfortunately even that good uh wasn't enough for me to buy any of these games yet and I know a lot of people are in the same boat this lack of new exciting games and no official news on when Nintendo's next system will release paints a pretty dull picture for the next few months in terms of Nintendo stuff to play and talk about so therefore it makes sense why people would be going back to look at Nintendo's previous handheld system which has a pretty stacked library of games that a lot of people didn't experience because Nintendo was in somewhat of a Dark Age when that handheld came out in general I also think people are just missing the traditional era of handheld gaming that was pretty much killed by the switch similar to my feelings on the community in the 3DS and Wii U ERA this is a much bigger discussion for another day but in my opinion the Nintendo switch kind of killed handheld gaming as we knew it beforehand now I'm not necessarily saying that this was a bad thing but you do have to admit that for the switch handheld gaming was in a much different place when I think of games that are good handheld games I think of games like Pokémon where your play session could range from a few minutes to a few hours and you can pick up and play at basically any time but now that technology has advanced in the gaming industry has evolved the line between handheld and console games has started to blur mainly due to the Nintendo switch Nintendo had and in my opinion still has a tight grip on the handheld Market but now consoles like the switch are powerful enough to run run those bigger console games on the go so they aren't tied to making only smaller games for handhelds anymore now I'm not trying to sit here and say that handhelds should have no big games but there is value in having smaller games that emphasize the fact that they're on a handheld console now all of those handheld e games are being put on the switch and being compared to their big console counterpart games like breath of the wild or Mario ay this naturally leads to criticism which I think is sometimes warranted I think that if two games are released for the same price on the same console in roughly the same genre they have the right to be compared to one another now there are a lot of other variables and nuances with this topic that I'm not going to cover right now that's a discussion for another day however my point with this is to say that there are a lot of games coming out on the Nintendo switch that feel like they would be made for a handheld like the 3DS but their price is still the price of a new home console game I love the Nintendo switch it's my favorite Nintendo system of all time but I will admit that in some ways I prefer the 3DS it has a compact and Sleek design and compared to the switch it is much easier to take with you anywhere and lots of people are realizing this now that the switch's life is coming to an end and they're thinking about what the next console could be this is why I think lots of people miss the handheld exclusive environment that systems like the 3DS provided therefore people are looking back at the system to get their handheld fixed or maybe even to do some modding arguably the biggest reason why people have been playing and talking about the 3DS as of late is due to the Homebrew and modding Community which is ginormous this is honestly the main reason why I made this video and I'm going to take some time to talk about what getting custom firmware on a 3DS has to offer and how it has kept the 3DS community alive and well getting home bro on your 3DS is easier than ever now all you need is any 3DS model a micr SD card and a computer powerful enough to download and transfer a few files so basically any computer I'm not going to tell you exactly how to do it because it varies by model and the optimal method changes all the time so I'm just going to link the 3DS hacking website in the description it has all the tools and guides that you'll need to mod your own system this is what I used to mod my 3DS a few months back and I only wish I did it sooner because it's super easy for me I decided to use a 64 GB micr SD card that should be more than enough for the normal person but I'm somebody who wants to have every game I could ever want to play loaded onto this thing so for me it wasn't enough to hold everything I wanted to play I could just get a bigger micro SD card but from what I've heard it's super difficult and annoying to transfer data so I decided it would just be easier to delete and install my games as I needed to my point with this is to say that if you're like me you may want to get an SD car that is one size bigger than you think you'll need just to be safe so I dusted off my new 2 s XL I got a while back and got to modding it took me around like an hour or something and it's super idiot proof as well as long as you can follow the instructions semi carefully you'll be fine it's really that easy so what can you do with a hack 3DS well there's lots of things the main thing I use my modded 3DS for is the h Shop this application allows you to download anything that was ever on the 3DS Nintendo ehhop completely for free normally I don't condone piracy I like to support the creators of games I play however the 3DS is completely discontinued at this point meaning that the only way to play these games is to buy secondhand and that can get expensive there are also a ton of digital only games that have no legal way to obtain them as of right now this is a larger discussion for another day of course but I personally think that if the product isn't even being sold anymore by the original producers piracy is fair game anyways back to the h Shop other than every 3DS game that was ever available on the shop there's dsiware games Virtual Console titles demos movies and even updates in DLC for all the games on the eShop basically everything that was ever on the eShop is available here including everything from different regions so if you're a big yo-kai watch fan like me who never got to play Busters 2 because it never came out in the west well now you can I mean it's still in Japanese but now you can there are even some Homebrew applications and ROM hacks for games that you can download here on the AG shop there isn't everything you could ever want to do with Homebrew available on here but there's still a lot to explore which makes it my favorite Homebrew application on the 3DS because of this app so many people are playing games that they didn't get to try when they came out or they wouldn't have given a chance otherwise and even though the shop is gone Homebrew is keeping all of those lost games alive which is cool to see from a preservation standpoint at the very least this is a big reason why I started playing my 3DS again I've covered the Revival of the eShop but what about the online servers well let me introduce you to pretendo this is a service that is in the process of Reviving the entirety of the Nintendo 3DS and Wii use online services which includes things like meerse and Wei you chat of all things it's a really cool project and while it's still in its beta stages it works pretty well and the fact that they are going above and beyond to revive things like mavers as well as very obscure online functionality like in Pikmin 3 is really impressive and I would totally recommend giving it a look while you need to mod your system to play it on 3D s you don't actually need to download any custom firmware to play on Wii U I haven't personally tried pretendo on Wii U yet but from what I've heard it also works pretty well I'll link their website in the description if you're interested there's also a surprising number of people playing on these servers maybe it's just because the servers recently shut down but I do think that these servers will continue to remain active because there's a pretty sizable community that is using these pretendo servers as I said earlier they are still in beta so there are only a handful of games that are supported but I can't wait to see what pretendo does in the future as their Community continues to grow day by day but what if you want to play emulators for other systems I mean that is the most common thing that people like to do with modded game consoles and other electronics in that case the 3DS home brw scene has got you covered there are several different emulators available on 3DS but the main one I used is Twilight menu this application allows you to play ROMs from several retro systems for this video I tried out NES SNES GBA and DS games and they all worked mostly well I didn't download a ton of NES and S NES games to my system but from what I tried they ran perfectly fine there was nothing really to speak of hey guys editing MJ here I just kind of wanted to button and clarify that the emulation with SNES on 3DS was not the best thing um there were some errors on there I was um you know playing it more to gather some footage for this video and I realize some of that stuff I'll try to show it on screen now if I can it's not the worst thing in the world however I would recommend trying to find another one maybe in the Universal updator I haven't personally done that yet because I haven't really needed to play SNES games that much on my 3DS however I just wanted to say that in Twilight menu not not not as good as I thought it was GBA emulation had some issues with the screen doing whatever this is I looked online to see what the issue was and there were actually a ton of people who had my same problem but all that people were saying was to just reset the game I tried doing that but somehow it just made it worse so I just downloaded a 3 3DS version of the mgba emulator and it worked like a charm this is the gba emulator I use on PC so it was awesome to see it here and it has a ton of cool features not in Twilight menu DS games are where things get interesting though the entire point of Twilight menu is that it Boots the 3DS into its DSi mode that is available in all systems you just never see it this is what allows DS cartridges to run natively when put into the 3DS it means that if you load in some ROMs you can run these DS games natively on the 3DS and even put the games on your home screen with some fiddling this is much better than emulating on PC in my opinion because it allows you to use the touch screen in the way that it was intended and it makes the gameplay experience feel overall better there are also a ton more emulators for various consoles available within Twilight menu and Beyond so there's even more to explore if you feel so inclined being able to play all these systems and every generation of Nintendo's handhelds on the go and on one single system is really cool and is a huge reason why I and many others have been taking our 3DS's everywhere lately Beyond 3DS games online servers and emulators there's so much more you can do with custom firmware there are reports of games like Cookie Clicker and Five Nights at Freddy's quality of life applications like this amiibo emulator and this this is this is so goofy it's very impressive to see what kinds of things people can get running on this system and most of it is available from the universal updator despite being called an updator this program can be used as a store of sorts to download these Homebrew applications just like the h Shop there isn't every Homebrew app in here but there is a lot more to explore than what the h Shop offers but the thing that intrigued me the most out of all these applications was a program that allows you to stream your 3DS screen to your PC hey we got one FP we're up to 10 now we're back to zero we're oh I mean we're getting somewhere it's very inconsistent and now it's just a zero yeah after messing with it for a bit I concluded that my internet was just not good enough to do this it probably doesn't help that my room is the literal furthest place in my house for my Wi-Fi router I have a wired connection for my PC which works really well so I'm fine on that front but my Wi-Fi does not work for what the 3DS needs to stream like this it's a shame too because this is a much cheaper alternative to getting a 3DS capture card but even from those who have gotten it to work I've heard it still isn't the best looks like my phone camera will have to do for now all in all there is so much to do with 3DS modding that I could go on for ages about more features and applications with all these extra things to do it's no wonder that the modding scene for this system has exploded and a lot of people are modding their consoles the 3DS is truly one of the most versatile handhelds out there it has some of the best Nintendo games in their back catalog so now people are looking back and seeing what this system has to offer so this is your time dust off your old 3DS or if you don't have one already try to hunt one down they are getting a bit expensive to buy secondhand but if you can find one for a good price I would strongly recommend picking it up funnily enough even though Nintendo has shut down everything on the system considering it dead the handheld and its Community are more alive than they have felt in years thanks to the server shutting down people looking back at the system after a long time has passed and the extensive modding community that has been established I've had so much fun with the system over the years it's the first Nintendo thing I ever owned and I've had so much fun revisiting this thing and I know that I'm going to be playing it more in the future so go mod your 3DS or at the very least you should go back and Revis visit it I've been MJ the shiny Hunter and thanks for watching oh golly G I can't wait to play me some Super Mario oh goodness I'm so incredibly excited here we go

Channel: MJ The Shiny Hunter

Views: 399,211

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Id: c3PltCBjvyQ

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2024