Get these Nintendo 3DS games before you can't: DSiWare, Pt. 2
Even more DSiWare titles to grab on the 3DS, while you still can.
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.
As of the end of March in 2023, you will no longer be able to make new purchases on the Nintendo 3DS eShop. That’s a shame for a number of reasons, from both a short- and long-term view, but in the months to go, you’ve still got time to grab what you want to from the store. Once again, let’s focus on the DSiWare releases.
DSiWare was the handheld cousin of Nintendo’s WiiWare service, when downloadable titles on consoles and handhelds were still relatively recent affairs, and the desire to brand them existed. Nintendo had the -Ware appendage, Microsoft had Xbox Live Arcade, Sony had Playstation Minis. It was a different time. You couldn’t get DSiWare games on a standard Nintendo DS or DS Lite system: you needed the mid-generation DSi for those. That iteration of the DS system dropped the Game Boy Advance backwards compatability, but added in a digital storefront. And while Nintendo did a pretty poor job of marketing the games it released on the service, be they their own developed and published titles or third-party ones, there were still some real gems on that shop.
And as short-lived as the whole endeavor was, it has lived on through the Nintendo 3DS eShop, and will continue to do so until Q1 of 2023 is at its end. There is only one real flaw with the DSiWare games being available on the 3DS, but it’s one worth noting as you consider what to grab while you still can: unlike the rest of the digital games available on the 3DS, DSiWare titles cannot run off of a micro SD card, which means you need to use the 3DS’ limited internal storage for them. You can store DSiWare titles on your micro SD just fine, but you’ll need to swap around which ones are installed and which ones are stored in order to actually play them and that’s especially worth mentioning given that, at some point, you presumably will not be able to access the games you’ve previously purchased.
Snapdots
Snapdots is basically a remake of a different puzzle game, to the point that many of the levels contained within are just levels from that game a second time. However, chances are good that you didn’t play the original, as it was a Japan-only release for the Game Boy Advance — Guru Logi Champ — developed by Compile. D4 Enterprise picked up quite a bit of Compile’s catalog in the days after the developer went under, and Guru Logi Champ was one such game. Remade as Snapdots and published by Nintendo, it’s one that’s worth your time if you want to play a different kind of puzzler.
In Snapdots, you are completing pictures by shooting blocks from a small UFO into gaps in the puzzle space. You rotate the space in order to fire at different areas, and use your limited number of blocks to fill the holes as well as temporarily utilize them as stopgaps to allow for you to put the blocks where they actually need to go. The game starts out very easy so you get the hang of how it works, but the complexity picks up in a hurry, especially after the blocks that you bump around with your own blocks come into play.
There are tutorials, and they are revisitable, as well as 150 puzzles for you to solve across five levels. You could do a lot worse than Snapdots for $5, but be warned that it will challenge you.
Starship Defense
One of my very favorite DSiWare titles, courtesy Q-Games. It’s a tower defense set in space, with enough interlocking systems and challenge to bring me back every few years to try it all over again:
You go from base to base, building defenses from scratch, but there is more to it all than simply surviving the waves. The currency you use to build more and stronger defenses piles up much faster if you try to get away with building as little as possible: at the end of each wave, you get a five percent bonus of whatever your remaining funds are. Play things economically enough, and you can defeat every enemy ship and save enough to install extra weaponry to help you survive those last, much more difficult waves, as well as the area boss. Get ahead of yourself with spending early on, and you’ll suffer for it.
On top of this, each completed wave awards you a crystal, which you can use to unlock the more devastating and unique weaponry on offer. Or you can use crystals to boost how much space cash you’re pulling in, or to utilize one of the three power-up cards you’re holding on to. These cards include a bomb that wipes the screen of enemies, a mercenary pilot to help you thin the ranks, a boost in cash, a health boost, and more. Sometimes, those cards might be the difference between winning and losing a stage.
Q-Games was one of the developers that consistently supported the DSiWare service with quality offerings, and while this isn’t as out there as X-Scape, it’s a great tower defense title you don’t want to miss out on if you’re into that sort of thing.
G.G. Series: Assault Buster
Not every game in the G.G. Series is a winner, but Assault Buster is likely the best of them. You run and boost through the air as a nameless woman in a suit of body armor carrying a very large sci-fi rifle, destroying every machine and robot that appears on screen. Each stage is just a single screen, and progress is marked by a depleting life bar that shrinks with each defeated foe. At the end of the level, a mini boss will appear, made up of blocks used as both defense and offense: the defensive ones can’t be destroyed but are meant to keep you from firing on the core of the boss until you’ve cleared a path through the blocks that are trying to fry you. Every couple of levels, you’ll face off against a different kind of boss foe who has similar powers to your own, and whose battles are a stage unto themselves.
Your life and remaining time carry over from stage to stage. The former refills through items that drop and cycle through different sub-weapons (bombs that absorb incoming bullets, ranged explosive devices, etc.) if you let it sit there on the ground, as well as a drop that says LIFE on it so there’s no mistaking what it’s going to do. The latter will only increase again after completing a stage, so the longer you take to complete a level, the less time you’ll have available to you later on, when you’re going to need the time in order to take out bosses that require as much dodging as firing to defeat.
Similarly, you can take your time and spend most of it on the ground firing straight up, but you need to take the time it takes you to finish into account: you’ll want to focus on improving at dashing all around and through the air to reach these foes and fire on them faster, rather than simply moving slowly on foot. You just don’t have time for that as the difficulty increases but the seconds remaining to complete a stage decreases.
The sprites and animation are better than most of what you find in the G.G. Series, the music fits the gameplay well, and it has a real high score-chasing setup to it all. It’s a lot of fun if you’re a fan of an arcade-style experience like that.
Aura-Aura Climber
Yet another Nintendo-published game worth grabbing on the DSiWare service — I mean, it was their service, they kind of had to keep popping games out for it — but unlike most of their catalog, this one was developed by the American Nintendo Software Technology studio. The game has three modes: Tutorial, Score Attack, and Endless. And while there aren’t a ton of levels here — just 10 within the main mode of Score Attack — the focus is very much on doing perfect runs of each stage in order to attain the highest scores and ranks. So you’ll get plenty of replay value out of the stages that are here, even if it would have been nice if there were more of them (or if the concept had been revisited again down the line).
You play as a little fallen star seeking to get back to space, who can jump once before needing to latch on to an object with its arm, which also serves to get you your jump back. So you basically hop toward the object you want to grab onto, then extend your arm to grab it, slinging yourself around with the help of gravity and inertia. The stages are quite large, with your view pretty limited, so any significant move you make has a bit of risk and surprise to it, which means you also aren’t likely to take the optimal path every time out on your first go, either. There are items to collect to increase your score, as well as obstacles to avoid, and you’ll pick up significant bonus points for holding onto usable items, as well as pulling off impressive stunts, like falling a very long distance before successfully grabbing on to something to launch yourself back up.
Given it didn’t require the use of the stylus, I’m a bit surprised that Aura-Aura Climber didn’t leave the DSi/3DS ecosystem and end up ported elsewhere, but then again, Nintendo releasing something cool and then basically forgetting about it is pretty on-brand, especially with DSi titles.
Spotto!
An Intelligent Systems puzzler, Spotto! sees you playing as a duck in a military helmet, throwing bombs at the ghosts that kidnapped the president’s daughter, Chikkie Wowwow. You’ll play through 50 different stages within the haunted house these ghosts call home, slinging bombs in arcs that see them land in the flying ghosts’ mouths on both your top and bottom screen.
You won’t just throw bombs with ease here: the trajectory is only partially mapped out, with you having to figure out the rest for yourself through trial, error, and vibes — since you have a limited number of bombs to throw in each stage, you can’t guess wrong too often. Every defeated ghost earns you another bomb back, and there are a limited number of super bombs to use which will spawn more bombs that could fall into more ghosts’ mouths while only using a single bomb, but still. You’ll want to really aim before you bomb.
While things start out simply enough, with you just figuring out basic arcing trajectories, you’ll quickly have to deal with obstacles in your way such as stacked furniture, and start figuring out how to make bank and bounce shots with the bombs into the mouths of moving ghosts, too. It’s got a goofy premise, tight gameplay, and rewarding puzzles to solve. You can’t ask for much more than that for a few bucks.
Flametail
Ever played MaBoShi’s Arcade on the Wii? Flametail is one of the three games contained within that, Square, broken out into its own as a DSi release:
You control a small square, which has a trail of squares behind it. When your square touches a grouping of blocks in its path, those blocks set on fire. You need to burn all of the blocks in a given stage before the bottom of the screen catches up to you: it moves up with each movement you make. You can’t just rush to the top and touch everything in your path, though: the levels are designed so that you accidentally trap yourself in your own fire blocks, or down dead ends. You need to sniff out these potential roadblocks and time all of your movements so that no block fails to burn before the screen catches up to it, while also ensuring that you don’t trap yourself before you reach the goal. It’s tough, but extremely satisfying when you make it work.
As Nintendo Life wrote about in their review of Flametail — the words above are from me on the Square portion of MaBoShi’s Arcade — the visuals and audio have been jazzed up a bit for this release, and enough was done to take this concept and justify it as its own game one with multiple modes. Square/Flametail aren’t easy, but it feels great when you nail the gameplay.
Metal Torrent
Nintendo’s history with shoot-em-ups is a short one, but Metal Torrent is part of that. It’s not especially innovative, but there are some nifty bits to it that make it worth it to you if you’re into the STG genre. If you aren’t already much of a shooter person, though, Metal Torrent isn’t going to change your mind.
That being said, the game plays very differently depending on which spaceship you choose at the start. The Red Orion is for beginners, as all you really need to do is dodge incoming fire — which there is plenty of — since the ship has such a huge spread for its own fire. And even if you fail to dodge incoming bullets, they’ll pass right through your ship unless you are hit by quite a few at a time, or by an enemy ship itself. You’ll easily refill your lost energy, too, since defeated ships refill the bar, and there are basically countless ships per wave.
The Blue Nova, on the other hand, is for experts of the genre. Any damage taken will blow up your ship, and your weapons don’t have the range they did in the other ship, either. Your special attack no longer destroys all of the bullets on screen, but instead, is a more standard concentrated laser blast that fires in front of you.
This was all a bit more enjoyable before the online leaderboards went down, but if you’re content with chasing your own high scores locally, Metal Torrent can still be fun. Just know that all of the challenge exists in the Blue Nova, and since enemy patterns are randomized and the game plays completely differently from one ship to the next, it’s not a mode you can prepare yourself for in advance, either.
Dragon Quest Wars
Did you know that Intelligent Systems once developed a Dragon Quest game? Well, Dragon Quest spin-off. And “just” a DSi one. Still, the developer of Fire Emblem and WarioWare having a game published by Square Enix is kind of neat, and puts them into similar territory as fellow Nintendo studio HAL Laboratory, which developed Alcahest for Squaresoft on the Super Famicom way back in 1993.
Dragon Quest Wars uses familiar enemies for units — Slime, Hammerhood, Dracky, Golem, Chimera, and Healslime — and you win by either defeating all of your opponents’ units, or by entering their base with one of your monsters. Intelligent Systems knew what they were doing with this kind of strategy title, so it’s fun, even if you can’t play it online anymore — know going in that the real meat of the experience prior was the ability to play online, but between the tutorial and the “Free” mode against computer opponents, you’ve still got a game to play, and you can still play against a friend locally, too. Wars is easy enough to pick up and play, but with some depth for those more familiar with the genre. How fitting, considering Dragon Quest’s own origins.
Dragon Quest Wars (co-developed by Tose) was supposed to be the first of six games Intelligent Systems would develop for Square to publish on the DSiWare service, but things didn’t end up working out like that. Intelligent Systems kept developing DSi titles — the aforementioned Spotto!, as well as WarioWare Snapped, Link ‘n’ Launch, and a few apps — but the relationship with Square doesn’t seem to have produced anything else I can find, at least not in North America. And not on DSi: Intelligent Systems did develop a 25th anniversary compilation of Dragon Quest I, II, and III for the Wii, released in 2011 exclusively in Japan. If you know of another Intelligent Systems/Square Enix collab from the time period that I’m not seeing, let me know.
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