There will never be a console quite like the 3DS again
Nintendo's beloved handheld was a statement about the unfiltered joy of play
There will never be a console quite like the 3DS again.
Something I lament about technological progress is that inevitably the most ruthlessly efficient and advanced options end up being the most boring. Big tech is utterly petrified of any sense of a human touch in their products. They want everything to be sleek, futuristic, uniform and devoid of personality.
Think about the journey of the humble mobile phone. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s the market was ripe with all kinds of goofy nonsense. I remember owning one too many of these beasts: flip phones; devices with slide out qwerty keyboards; clamshells with impossible to read displays. I had, as a grown adult, an O2 Cocoon, a real piece of shit phone that I wholeheartedly loved. It had a stand charger that when plugged in, became an alarm clock. I still have the message alert tone burned into the back of my mind like a memory of a car crash.
Genuinely terrible things, many of these were, but they had masses of character and as much as I like the functionality and power of my Oneplus 6T, it’s just a black rectangle. It could be any phone. And the real tragedy is that there is absolutely no technical reason why we had to throw out one design paradigm in favour of another, less interesting one.
Games consoles quickly followed this trend, adapting and improving on trusted form factors and aesthetic designs to produce things that may be distinct to the eye but functionally all behave in exactly the same way: mini-PCs with sleek but uninspired interfaces; ergonomic identikit controllers for maximum functional parity; it’s astonishing that the ‘console wars’ endure still in this brave new era of uniform design and hyper focused risk aversion.
Technology moves at a rapid pace. Machines get faster, smarter, more able to power games that look better than the pre-rendered cutscenes we all stared in wide eyed amazement at 20 years ago. In terms of identity, however, it really feels like the industry peaked with the Xbox 360, and as a result, choosing a games console is now less about an adjunct to your lifestyle and more about the ever shrinking contingent of franchises you are reluctantly willing to bet the bank on.
I don’t even know if I can be arsed with the current generation following spiralling unit costs and zero emphasis on their respective unique features. I'm fortunate enough to own a fairly substantial PC for the 'big games', but even still my noisy, chugging PS4 is more than enough for everything else. These things have become tedious, overpriced and largely representative of a worryingly singular future for the industry.
For years Nintendo’s console manufacturing division avoided this dreadful fate, producing an array of brilliantly inventive, playful machines that you could easily identify at a glance. Technical prowess be damned, form and function too, they wanted you to have fun with them. They wanted your family members to have fun with them. For all its faults the Wii was a brilliantly singular thing that was more interested in being accessible and playful than a vessel for the same tired genre favourites found on other devices; and as much as folk will have you believe it the crime of the century, the Wii U was a wonderfully inventive follow up, one that was never quite allowed to blossom into something truly brilliant.
Brought into the world kicking and screaming, even the Switch had an absolutely killer core concept: Play at home, play outside, play anywhere. A device with multiplayer functionality built into its controller design. It’s just a very cool thing, a clearly understood modus operandi executed near perfectly. But that sheen would prove to be short lived.
The Switch Lite burst on the scene a few years later, a great budget option for those billy-no-mates among us who didn’t mind the drop in functionality, based on the kind of games we wanted to play. What came out of it, however, ended up being the first major push towards technological conformity. It ultimately exists in the same space as smartphones: Sleek, futuristic, uniform and devoid of personality.
I own a Switch lite. I love my Switch lite. For me it’s an optimal way to play the kind of games I normally want to play. But it’s most definitely a console that is to be played on, not with, a machine I do not feel excited about using independent of whatever game I’m currently fixated on, and I fear that the resultant split in functionality between the two versions of this console has meant that the inherent playfulness implicit in the original design is being left to gather dust.
There's a place and a utility for Nintendo's current gen hardware in my life. It's a great little thing chock full of brilliant games, albeit sometimes not the most optimal version of those games. But it was only when I revisited the 3DS last year that I rediscovered a real joy to be had from the act of play, and truly realised what has been lost in the transition.
The 3DS is a thing of beauty. A handheld console that feels born of another timeline, a tangential technological future where form and function have been built from the ground up by artists not engineers. It has so many strange features, ones evolved and adapted since, many present in the current gen even, but here they exist in this adventurous, more tactile way.
The touch screen is a given, an evolutionary track from the glory days of the DS, but even today it still feels really nice to use. Pressing the stylus down on buttons has a nice clunk to it, the ever so slight feedback delay becoming a feature not a bug, because it really doesn’t feel like modern touchscreens, which can almost be dismissed as an afterthought, manhandled thoughtlessly as you swipe and scroll through whatever bullshit adorns your screen. Here real thought has to be put into how you interact with this screen.
The same approach applies to the gyroscopic controls too, a feature also present in the Switch and used to frustrating abandon in that one marble maze shrine challenge in Breath of the Wild. I always found that in more ambitious applications of the tech that it never quite found a solution to the cumbersome nature of actually using it. You know the drill. Upside down, giving you a horrible headrush. At that weird angle where you can feel your rib cage just desperate to escape through your skin. I've never had gyroscopic controls be normal, not ever, and this isn't any different for the 3DS.
The variance in frustration comes from how seriously the software takes itself. Recently I played WarioWare Gold, a silly collection of daft mini games that use the physical buttons, touch screen and gyroscopic controls for a range of low stakes rapid firing challenges, and it just works here. You're too busy laughing to notice that your elbows shouldn't be launched at that angle. In fact WarioWare Gold is a strong contender for perfect representation of a device's capabilities. So many great ideas all rolled into one.
You may notice I haven’t mentioned what is famously the core feature of the 3DS, the thing that elevates it beyond anything else, it’s killer USP, a marvel of modern technology used to brilliant effect.
That’s right, I’m talking about Streetpass.
One of the more minor regrets in my life is that I never had the chance to properly utilise this brilliantly anachronistic way of connecting 3DS users on the go, so its scope and capabilities are sadly lost on me. Even before the shutdown of the e-shop, the dwindling twilight years of the 3DS’s popularity have meant that this function is at its lowest ebb.
I never got to experience the thing at its peak: a communal way of forming bonds with strangers in a physical space as well as a digital one; building a multiversal community long, long before any of these NFT ape idiots ever got their delicate little hands on the concept. My brief and singular time using it at its peak was in a Bravely Default minigame, in which you can call on other users Mii’s to help speed up rebuilding efforts in your village, and that feels barely appropriate an anecdote to relay. It’s such a ‘2006-era Facebook game’ kind of application of the system, and I’m sure there are plenty of folk online who will relay their time with it much better than I ever can.
In a peculiar way, the 3D element of this handheld's namesake is perhaps its least interesting aspect. Certainly the novelty of experiencing games in this new perspective allows us to better appreciate the presence of their architecture. There were moments during my time with Zelda: A Link Between Worlds where the added depth of field actually benefited my navigation of some of that game, and beyond functional benefits it was nice to get some oohs and ahhs in by flicking the 3D switch on and seeing all the visual layers of a game stretch back into the screen. Even now a good decade on I’m still impressed by it.
The overall sense I get from that, admittedly incredible, technology however is that it is more gimmick than essential. Hardware revisions down the line removed it entirely. It's cool, at times it really brings games to life, but it's never felt like an essential function.
Perhaps the same could be said of street pass, the gyroscope, the touch screen. All features heroically unessential to the experience of play, and certainly a lot of the games I'm currently working my way through on the handheld are treating it as a super powered DS most of the time.
This is a machine with countless inventive, playful ideas built for it, ones that feels bespoke and console specific, but beyond that it was a rock solid piece of hardware. Games look great on it, they play great too. I’ve not checked out the infamous Kid Icarus Uprising yet, so I’m sure my opinion would quickly sour on its control scheme but for the majority of my time with the console, the tactility and form of its control scheme was a delight more than a menace.
Beyond anything else, in its presentation, in the execution of it’s ideas and functions, and the very act of opening that clamshell, priming your stylus and waiting for the friendly start up jingle to sound, the 3DS is something that makes me happy to play it, no matter what game I’ve got loaded in the cartridge slot.
There will never be a console quite like the 3DS again. It was born of a very specific era of transitional technology. In that space it had an entire kingdom, and sadly that kingdom feels less imposing with every day that passes. It’s online services are quietly being put to rest. It’s physical library is often priced out of the hands of those who would truly cherish it.
While the sadness of its twilight years is something that I, a late adopter, definitely share with those who stayed with the handheld throughout it’s lifetime, I should definitely point out here that it’s not a dead console. In the UK at the least it’s very easy to still buy any version of the 3DS, and while certain games have been marked up to frankly stupid heights by the collector’s market you can still buy a good chunk of the physical library for close to retail price or less (not to mention the market for DS games is incredibly cheap these days, and there are some great games on that system that work just as well on the 3DS).
For the digital only stuff, you’ll have to look to one of many comprehensive hacking guides to get access to now. The guide I used to set up homebrew on my machine did required an eshop purchase, even if it was a free one, so it’s not something i’m certain still works, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone who knows how to bypass this.
I don’t really know how to end this post. I can’t say what the future has in store for Nintendo, whether the financial success of the Switch and Switch lite will end up burying their creative drive. The consolidation of their home console and handheld divisions speaks to a great homogeneity on the horizon, no doubt any future hardware announcements will be intrinsically handheld from the get go, but I hope they never forget that broad strokes UX design and a little bit of sillyness can sit hand in hand. That software and hardware are part of the same symbiotic relationship and that the market does still have a space for these kinds of things, even as a techno monoculture seems to be dominating the space.
That’s it. That’s the post. The 3DS is good. You should get one to experience it for yourself. And you should hack it so you don’t have to pay £100 for a copy of Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey Redux. That money isn’t going to the developers anyway, so go ham!