RIP: Nintendo 3DS & Wii U eShop*

 

There could probably be a lot of things I could say in regard to the 3DS and Wii U eShops closing to new purchases relating to topics like video game preservation. Still, as a civilian who is not connected to the video game industry in any way shape, or form, I can only speculate beyond the reasons that Nintendo gave back in February 2022.  

I really just wanted to take today to say "thank you" to the 3DS eShop for being a functional storefront where I could track prices on games in my wishlist, browse games that were on sale (including an end date for the sale), and rate games that I had put in the minimum amount of time.  Sure there were things that I would have changed about the 3DS eShop like being able to browse games in a list mode instead of having to scroll horizontally through 25 games half a dozen times. After going through the eShop on the Wii U, I found that I would have liked the Virtual Console tab to have been split up by systems and not just have everything grouped together.

I was pretty miffed though after the New 3DS released and there were exclusive games that only that version of the 3DS/2DS could play because at the time I only had my original 3DS.  I was also sad that the last Virtual Console game released that was playable on the standard 3DS was a series of Pokemon games and nothing new after that time; February 2016 I believe.

As for the Wii U eShop, because I only started using a Wii U for the first time in 2021, I cannot really comment on the evolution of that storefront, only that it works.  I do wish that there was a separate tab to see all of the different Virtual Consoles though such as the games for the TurboGrafx16 which I did not were accessible until I did a search on Wikipedia.

So far thee well, the ability to purchase games from the 3DS and Wii U eShop.  Had I all the money and hard drive space, I could have spent upwards of $250 on all of the games I wanted, but I did pick up quite a few games that I did want to buy and several others that were too tempting to pass up.  And because I am finishing this article on Sunday, March 26th, I cannot say for certain if any games will have a final last-day sale on Monday, March 27th.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

This Has Happened Before

* I, of course, know that the eShops for the 3DS and Wii U are not actually dying or closing down entirely per the use of RIP, I just figured it was a semi and not at all original way to title this article.