Tag: 3ds

News

No! Please don’t take the weeds out of Animal Crossing

I’ve heard many lovers of Animal Crossing: New Leaf (2012) express a desire to go back and play some more. What’s stopping them? It’s the fear of what state their town will be in after the mayor disappeared for six months (or more). Animal Crossing’s infamous weeds are the personification of this guilt, growing in your town every day you’re absent; a grand public exhibition for your neglect. But an upcoming update to Animal Crossing: New Leaf will remove them forever. Whoopee, you might say. But no, don’t be so hasty, as this may actually diminish what makes Animal Crossing so…
Conveni Dream
News

Conveni Dream tries to make management sympathetic

The dream starts small. It feels big, but in the grander scheme of life and business, it is small. You have a convenience store, and a small one at that—just a few shelves and one part-time helper. But maybe—just maybe—it can be something more. If you work hard, if you make the right choices, and if everything goes your way. If, if, if. This is both the promise of small-time entrepreneurship and of Conveni Dream, a new game for Nintendo 3DS that turns the challenges of starting a small business into a colorful joyride. Sure, there are stakes—some will build…
Feature

Nintendo is interested in VR. Just not how you think.

This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// In 1990, the word “Nintendo” was the generic trademark for videogames. A quarter-century later and Nintendo is now just one voice among many in a chorus that too often sounds like a single note of varying volumes. To survive so long, Nintendo have had to play an exotic chord or two, pushing in directions beyond what is expected. Their most recent key change, the Wii U, never caught on with the mainstream public; rumors point to production ceasing after only…
News

Take a look at Rollovski, the adorable Simogo game that never was

Recently made available for free over on their blog, Simogo’s Rollovski is adorable, clever, and unfortunately, only four levels long. The game, an unreleased prototype, stars a round, limbless detective of the same name, following him on his journey to infiltrate a strange hotel made up entirely of circular rooms. Along the way, players must avoid capture from spotlights and, like in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, build up enough speed to roll around the environment’s many loops. Unfortunately, like its ball-shaped main character, it was never quite able to get off the ground. Rollovski‘s story begins in 2012, when shortly after releasing…
Review

Mario & Luigi Paper Jam Bros. folds in on itself

There’s something strange—maybe even broken—about fetishizing materiality in a digital world the way Mario & Luigi Paper Jam Bros does, though it’s not the first game to do this. I first noticed this in another Nintendo game from last year, Yoshi’s Wooly World, which trades on a contradiction. It’s a game about adorable dinosaurs in adorable environments made out of yarn and glue. Aesthetically, it’s “crafty,” which we value precisely because of its irreproducibility. Flaws aren’t flaws in this context; they’re signs of the hands that made it. And yet videogames are bits—0s and 1s—all the way down: data perfectly,…
News

In DotCity, the monster to your futuristic mega city will be an unceasing population

Allegedly there are projects on Kickstarter other than Shenmue 3. Allegedly DotCity is one of those projects.  DotCity, which was created by Nathan Irondot, is a city simulator that challenges you to manage resources and guide your metropolis out of the industrial revolution and far into the future. You start with an empty two-dimensional plane. There are a few dots on the plane. Those dots are people. You can build up, or out, or both using currency and construction materials. The real challenge here is how to design a city that can accommodate—and thrive under—the demographic transitions that are unlocked…