Digital 3DS Games You Need to Buy Before the 3DS eShop Shuts Down
Main image: 3D Sega Classics Collection
Chances are good that you already know about Nintendo’s plans to shut down the 3DS eShop on March 27, 2023. This means that more games than we can write about here are going to vanish overnight: since you already know how subscription services ruined digital distribution’s promise and how this all-digital future threatens to erase gaming’s past, we can just move on to a whole bunch of games you should buy before you can’t.
Or, at least, games to remember for later when you have to [a lawyer rushes into the room to stop me right there]. Let’s get to it: the 3DS eShop includes digital exclusives, Virtual Console titles you can’t find elsewhere, backwards-compatible supported DSiWare, and a slew of remastered 3D classics that occasionally made for a definitive version of an old favorite. We’ll be touching on the necessaries from all four of those groups.
DSiWare
Art Style (series): There are four Art Style DSiWare games on the 3DS—three developed by Chibi-Robo! studio skip Ltd., and the fourth by another common Nintendo partner from the day, Q-Games. Skip’s outings first.
In Boxlife’s R&D mode, you use the stylus to cut, fold, and attach specific spots on connected squares laying on the ground, so that the remaining squares fold into boxes. You’re trying to make as many as you can before time runs out, and will be scored on how long it takes to do so. After you succeed at this, you’re promoted to Factory, where you now have to worry about the price of paper in your box-folding enterprise: your score is your money, and more dollars means more little knick knacks to fill out your home. Yes, Boxlife is a game about the tedium of work, but it’s also a clever little puzzler.
Aquia fills a vertically oriented rectangle stretching across both of your screens with colored blocks that you need to match in threes. You work on the outsides of that rectangle, swapping the blocks at the edges—push in from the right, and blocks come out the left, then you have to shove them in from the left and make new ones come out from the right, and so on. If you fail to keep up with the pace of the scuba diving happening on the right of the screen, you’ll lose some visibility of the rectangle and what’s contained within. Like with Boxlife—and every Art Style release, really—it starts out simple enough and then tries to crush you.
And then there’s PiCTOBiTS, which I can tell you without hyperbole is one of the best things Nintendo has ever put their name on. I’ve been obsessed with it for 14 years now, and it’s a shame it never received a sequel or port. You grab individual pixels with the stylus to match them on the bottom screen, which fills in sprites from classic NES and Famicom titles. The blocks fall in patterns you need to discern, and fast, before the entire bottom clogs up: you can wipe entire lines away, but it will use up some of your space for holding blocks, and then it costs coins to get that space back. And you want those coins to unlock new levels—including the much tougher dark world versions of each stage—and the game’s soundtrack, which is, again, no hyperbole, one of the best collections of chiptune tracks going: it’s all arrangements of classic NES songs, and some of them go hard.
Digidrive is the Q-Games entry, and the quickest way to explain it is that you control the flow of traffic at an intersection in order to extend your play. Like with many Art Style games, the premise might seem weird or unappealing, but it’s addictive and just flat-out works.
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