First of all, here’s last night’s Nintendo Direct boiled down to the part you actually care about. Five minutes of footage, and yeah, it looks spectacular. Now here’s the part where we make fun of Nintendo for two hundred words.
Hey, did you hear that Nintendo just launched a pretty much entirely new portable console? No? That’s because they’re pretending that it’s basically the same as the old one! Meet the New 3DS. Yes. It’s called the New 3DS.
The New 3DS has, admittedly, only incremental improvements. It’s now got a little nipple over the buttons on the right, which are now colored to look like Super Nintendo controllers, that’s nominally an analog stick. It’s faster under the hood, to the point where Nintendo can now port Wii games to the thing, which it’s doing with Xenoblade Chronicles. It’s also got a longer battery life, going from 3.5 hours to 6 or 7. Also, weirdly, the New 3DS is heavier than the old one, but the XL version is lighter. It’s only in Japan, for now; a US release won’t be until next year.
Mostly, though, this is worrying. That nipple is actually called the C-stick, and that’s not a coincidence; you might remember that was the GameCube’s weird annoying little analog stick. If Nintendo is nostalgic for the GameCube and the Super Nintendo, that’s… that’s really bad. “Hey, remember when our competitors handed our asses to us completely and punted us down to third place in a market we formerly dominated? Good times!”
Similarly, there are some train wrecks coming up. The aforementioned port will only be playable on the New 3DS; old ones won’t be able to. That won’t end with angry consumers!
Beyond that, there’s a lot of news for 3DS fans: Bravely Second is on the way, there are a mess of games, and there is, of course, more. If you want to watch the whole Nintendo Direct, you can find it, as always, on YouTube.