Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can't: Virtual Console, Pt. 1
The 3DS doesn't have a massive Virtual Console library, but what's there is largely essential.
Nintendo announced that, as of the end of March 2023, they will be shutting down the digital storefronts of their last generation handheld and home console, the 3DS and Wii U. And without plans to make the games on those shops available elsewhere. This means a massive chunk of video game history will be closed off to the rest of us; before that can happen, let’s figure out what you should seek out and add to your system memory on those platforms, via a series of posts on the subject.
It’s not that the Nintendo 3DS is overflowing with Virtual Console goodies. It’s more that a significant percentage of the games on the store simply aren’t available anywhere else. The Game Boy family of games were backwards-compatible from the Game Boy Color onward, and the DS could play Game Boy Advance titles, but once the DSi arrived, the family tree hadn’t just branched off, it had split entirely. The 3DS’ eShop served as a long overdue reunion of sorts, and while not everyone showed up to the party, at least a whole lot of games you wanted to see again, and some you maybe didn’t realize you wanted to see, were there.
In addition to making Game Boy and Game Boy Color games available, the 3DS also had a handful of Game Gear titles, and added SNES and NES games, as well. No Game Boy Advance games, however, outside of the free ones Nintendo gave to early adopters. You’ll just have to get your copy of Wario Land 4 or Kirby & the Amazing Mirror on the Wii U while you still can. Much of the focus in these VC pieces will be on the games you can’t find anywhere else, instead of on SNES and NES titles that are easier to legally find. There will be some exceptions, though, and there are even a couple of 3DS-exclusive VC titles, for whatever reason.
Summer Carnival ‘92 Recca (NES)
I wrote about Recca early in 2022 under the Re-Release This banner, since a definitive edition of the game basically doesn’t exist. By next spring, you won’t be able to get any edition of it.
Recca is a genuine blast to play, even in its diminished, emulated, 3DS form. It’s certainly not for everyone, since it is punishing and will require you be into the idea of replaying the same few minutes at a time again and again until you’ve mastered them, but if you’re into that, you’ll love it. There is a “normal” mode, which is basically just “here is the home version of the game,” and there are also time and score attack modes that change the layout while adding obstacles you can either die by crashing into, or blow up in order to secure the point bonuses inside. You might be doing that instead of firing at a wave of enemies, though, so like with everything else in Recca, it’s all a balance you need to figure out in order to pull off the most successful run possible.
It might not be the perfect Recca, but it’s just $5 and what we’ve got. For now, anyway.
Sonic the Hedgehog (Game Gear)
No, no, this isn’t the original Sonic the Hedgehog, but the Game Gear’s title slightly based on that. Sega’s portable didn’t have the horsepower to recreate what they managed on the Genesis, so, instead of a watered-down port of what was then a fast-paced game, Sega instead commissioned a new one that was more the Game Gear’s speed.
It’s more deliberate and focused on platforming than any other Sonic game you might have played because of this, but I think that works to its benefit. And while I might be saying that as someone who can be talked into the original Sonic the Hedgehog as arguably superior to its sequel, there are surely others out there like me who appreciate a more thoughtful Sonic level design.
And hey, since Sega seems intent to not re-release games like this or Sonic the Hedgehog Pocket Adventure in uninspiring collections like Sonic Origins, you might as well spend the $5 on the 3DS release while you still can.
Avenging Spirit (Game Boy)
Avenging Spirit is fascinating, in part because it’s a Game Boy port of an arcade release, and also manages to be the superior version of the game despite the massive downgrade in hardware. The artists really worked to make sure that the style of the original came through in a monochrome 8-bit portable, though, and tweaks were made to the gameplay to improve the overall enjoyment of the experience.
Hardcore Gaming 101 has a breakdown of the differences between the two releases, if you’re interested in learning more, but here are the basics: a boyfriend is killed by gangsters while walking with his girlfriend, and he finds a way to come back as a very adorable ghost capable of possessing enemies standing in between his incorporeal form and his kidnapped love. Your have an energy bar that depletes when you’re in ghost form, as well as a life bar when you’ve possessed a foe — a baseball player, martial artists, Amazon warriors, soldiers, mafiosos, robots, and so on — and the goal is to find the three keys hidden in the game’s few stages in order to unlock the door your still-living lady is trapped by. Fail to find the keys, and, well, your ending is going to be even less happy than “dying before the game even begins” implies.
Avenging Spirit, as the Game Boy releases on the 3DS tend to be, is also inexpensive. You can pick up this forgotten gem for $2.99, which is much better than paying $45 for a modern limited physical release if your intent is to actually play the thing instead of display it. Don’t be fooled by the terrible North American box art, either: this is a cute-looking game about ghosts, even if it’s darker than its art style implies.
Catrap (Game Boy)
An excellent puzzle game that tricks you into thinking it’s simple, until you realize you’ve only been playing tutorial stages that aren’t named such.
It’s this ability to rewind that allowed Catrap to make the puzzles as complicated and difficult as developer Kodansha did, too, so having the feature there is not just a matter of convenience. Knowing players would be free to experiment, to spend as much time on a particular level as possible using trial and error to progress, allowed them to make some serious head scratchers that required real thought. And believe me, you will find yourself stumped on more than one occasion, no matter how good you think you might be at this kind of game.
You could do a lot worse with $3 than Catrap, that’s for sure.
The Mysterious Murasame Castle (NES)
Another Famicom-exclusive game released as an import on the 3DS shop, The Mysterious Murasame Castle is actually a Nintendo-developed-and-published game that, for whatever reason, never made it out of Japan. It’s a bit weird, for sure — Goichi Suda named it as the game he’d like to revive from Nintendo’s extensive back-catalog, and if Suda51 is into it, you know it’s not straightforward — but not the kind of weird that had things avoiding international releases back in 1986, either.
You play as a samurai who must defeat an alien that has taken over Murasame Castle, and whose influence has turned the feudal lords of nearby castles against their neighbors. And you do this in a top-down environment, switching between ranged and melee attacks, trying not to die in a game that can get pretty fast-paced for the year and console in question. For $5, you can see what Nintendo withheld from us between 1986 and 2013, and will apparently be withholding from us again as of Q2 2023.
Donkey Kong ‘94 (Game Boy)
One of the best games on the original Game Boy, and a showcase for what the Super Game Boy was capable of, Donkey Kong ‘94 remains the standard bearer for what the original style Donkey Kong games could be.
And it is no exaggeration to say that Nintendo never again reached this level of quality within the Donkey Kong franchise. The Mario vs. Donkey Kong games are good, don’t get me wrong, but none of them match what ‘94 brought to the table, and it isn’t close. It was beloved at the time — Electronic Gaming Monthly named it their Game of the Year for 1994 — and is still beloved now: Polygon rated it as the best Donkey Kong game ever back in 2018, ahead of literally every other iteration of Kong. Now, I’m not quite that enamored with it, but I’m not going to heartily argue against it, either. There are all of three DK games I prefer to this one, which is pretty damn good for a series that has been pumping out games in various iterations for 40 years now.
Sometimes, you get things perfectly right nearly 30 years ago, and that’s alright. So long as what you got right remains available, anyway.
An absurd amount of Kirby
There is no video game console that lets you play every single Kirby game, no, but the 3DS tried its best to be that. In addition to the slew of brand new games and ports, the 3DS also features a whole bunch of Virtual Console releases, some of which only appear there.
Kirby’s Dream Land and its direct sequel, Dream Land 2, are both there. And while they’re weaker entries in the series compared to what would follow, they’re still the games that helped launch the pink puffball into a franchise that could stick around for 30 years and counting, too, and worth experiencing today. Kirby’s go at pinball, Pinball Land, is a neat and inexpensive diversion from the Game Boy part of the Virtual Console, and you can grab Star Stacker if you want a falling-block puzzler — though, might I suggest seeking out the Super Famicom version of this game, which adds more depth and complexity to the proceedings? Kirby’s Dream Course is one of the few SNES titles on the service, and I find Kirby’s Block Ball to be a fun take on the Arkanoid/Breakout formula:
So, instead of just another Breakout clone that happens to be cute because of Kirby, HAL and Nintendo R&D1 developed something that stands on its own, and helped to contribute to the paddle genre itself. Kirby’s Block Ball doesn’t feature just the one paddle, but can include up to four, one on each side of the screen. Instead of your ball going into the abyss when it misses the paddle, there are spikes: if the ball hits the spikes, you lose a life and have to try again.
…
It looks like a Kirby game, it sounds like a Kirby game, and it utilizes elements specific to Kirby games to ensure that the end result was a Kirby game in the Breakout style, instead of a Breakout game featuring Kirby. It’s not a massively popular game by any means, but it’s still a vital piece of evidence in the argument that Game Boy, more than with any other Nintendo mascot, belonged to Kirby.
Seriously, though, how did Nintendo not import the Super Famicom version of Star Stacker onto the 3DS shop, too? It’s the one widely distributed Kirby game that didn’t get an international release, and that remains the case. Regardless, you’ve got a bunch of Kirby to choose from on the 3DS’ Virtual Console, but you could just grab them all given the low cost of these releases, especially the Game Boy ones.
Legend of the River King(s) (Game Boy Color)
Would you like to mix fishing games with role-playing game elements? Then Legend of the River King is for you:
Legend of the River King is not a game I played in my youth, when the Game Boy and Game Boy Color were active handheld systems, but is one I got into recently as an adult. Which is probably good, since I’m not sure I would have had the patience for this kind of experience back when I was a pre-teen getting more into action games, who needed a bit more narrative than this from my role-playing game experiences, to boot. With the patience of an adult who knows that relaxing is a requirement in life, though — one who is also not particularly enamored with the idea of actually going fishing — Legend of the River King scratched a particular itch for me. Enough so that I’m going to want to dive in to its sequel, too.
And yes, Legend of the River King 2 is also available on the 3DS eShop if you also want to play more of this series, and each entry is $5.
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters (Game Boy)
It’s pretty easy to argue that the Game Boy sequel to the NES original is the superior entry in the series, since it worked to do away with some of the larger design annoyances, and created a more streamlined adventure in the process, one that even the child version of me was able to solve back when the green-tinted brick was the only Game Boy around. It’s no Uprising, no, but literally nothing is.
It’s worth grabbing the 3D Classics’ version of Kid Icarus, the modern Uprising, and the middle child Game Boy release in order to complete what remains, to this point, a trilogy spanning 35-plus years of game development. Maybe if we all buy them up before the 3DS shuts down its digital storefront, Nintendo will be convinced to make a fourth title in their mostly ignored series! I mean, they won’t, but on the bright side, you’d have three games to play that range from “neat” to “hell yeah, Sakurai, you’ve done it again,” so you’d still come out ahead.
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages/Seasons (Game Boy Color)
I might consider them to be one game, but Nintendo demands you pay for both separately on the eShop for some reason.
This style of 2D Zelda is also a bit more difficult than Link to the Past, both in terms of the action portions as well as simply getting from place to place, which is part of why every one of them in this vein ranks higher on the list than LttP did. Link to the Past is too easy to get through, faeries too readily available to erase your mistakes in battle or deep in dungeons, which themselves aren’t all that difficult to get through, either. In the Oracle titles, there are no bottles. Which means no faeries in bottles. You can buy magic potions which act in a similar fashion, but you can’t just find them out in the wild at any time, for free, easily replenished at any time. You have to be a little more careful, a little less reckless, a bit more intentional with how you play the Oracle games. And I respect that, even in the moments where, oh, I don’t know, Zombie Ganon is being a huge pain in the ass, or I’m extremely deep into a dungeon and already used my magic potion but can’t escape just yet to get more.
Capcom’s little foray into Zelda development produced some real gems, and you should grab them before they’re once again lost to time, or you’re forced to look at Ebay pricing for the originals.
Nintendo should just remake them for the Switch in a single package using the same engine they did for Link’s Awakening (which you can also grab on the 3DS shop in its Game Boy Color, DX release form), but who knows if they’ll actually do something like that when they could instead not do that.
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