Recently I’ve found my 3DS again, with no stylus, no games, and a broken 3D switch.
Since I’ve heard the e-shop would’ve closed down soon (and now has closed down), I decided to hack it.
Yeah, it actually was easy to do, just like everyone says it is, haha, very funny. Though the obvious use-case of that is, of course, piracy, I don’t want the end all of it to be that. There are so many possibilities, modding is fun!.
I immediately did some theme modding, I installed pre-made ones, then got to actually making my own some of my own, thanks to Kame Editor, it was actually really simple.
But that’s not all the 3DS can do, some people make whole indie games for it, and I’m not talking just about indie games that were published on the 3Ds, I mean Indie Games!
Most of the 3ds software-modding efforts consist in porting other games into 3DS instead of making brand-new games, I assume this is because it would be a lot of work to make a new game. It’s a shame no DS game maker-style software surfaced for the 3DS, and I imagine it probably never will, so I’ll talk about ports a lot.
Can the 3DS run doom? Yes, very well actually, this is a pretty good port of the PrBoom into the 3DS, it doesn’t play that well, obviously, since you should play first-person shooters with a mouse (yes, even doom, which was made with mouses in mind, and it not being so is, uh, doom revisionist propaganda.) but it still runs well, and it even has a 3D mode, which would be really cool if 3D wasn’t a cheap gimmick that gives you headaches. But you can even load custom wads into this! Fully functional, I imagine you can use it as your main Doom method of gameplay, though… I can’t imagine what would bring you to do so. It’s still at least a cool novelty!
The 3DS port of EDuke3D works like a charm, it stutters a little, but I mean, it’s great! But… it plays really bad. The stylus kept stuttering and aiming while walking doesn’t work at all.
I would love for it to use the gyro, it’s such an under-utilized feature in the 3Ds, I can only imagine implementing it is a nightmare. Which is a shame, the 3DS had near zero FPS’s, hell, the DS had more! Not even monkey ball uses the gyro…
Portal is supposed to be a Portal DS sequel, but it doesn’t have, uh, portals at the moment, sadly. When you die, the console message is “player is dead, yo”. It’s pretty impressive, since it’s actually the only original 3DS homebrew game with 3D in it. But it, uh, has no game yet.
The first game I found that was a full game that was made entirely for 3DS, it was made with a LOVE2D mod that makes it work on 3DS, which is super cool. It’s a super simple dating simulator with an awful sense of humor, which actually makes it all even more charming.
It’s pretty obvious the developers are just annoying teens and making a 3Ds game is a pretty crazy idea, specially since it looks like it’s their first published game.
RPG-maker emulation is not there yet with the 3DS. I tried playing OFF, and it ran horribly at like, 30 fps which like, whatever, but when you were in battle it dropped to 5 frames a second.
The dream of playing omorashi fetish games on the 3ds is still a faraway fantasy for the freaks of the world.
The 3DS has a really good thing going for it: it's a DS and a GBA too, so it's basically three consoles in one. This is why it's called the 3DS. Don't look that up, its true. Playing these was a lot more enjoyable because there are a lot more weird and bad fan games, which is, at least to me, what true art is. Sadly I can’t really play them on 3DS due to homebrew limitations… but here’s some stuff I could get my hands on!
Me reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison on the DS in portuguese (my native language!).
This thing is actually pretty good. I know I said I was going to talk about weird games but these things can work better than a Kindle, it’ll be where I’ll be doing my academic reading for now on, if you dual wield this with Brain Age you might become the next Albert Einstein.
This is a pretty impressive port for what an absurd concept it is, it’s fully 3D and has a lot of weapons, though I suspect they’re just different models for the same gun… the game controls fine and is fully functional, it even has multiplayer! It’s a marvel of modern game-dev… I just wish people would actually play it! I think it might be fun, even if it’s super-simple as a port. It still has the basic CS essence. It’s cool!
This released on the 3DS e-shop by some miracle. It’s not a Homebrew game, it’s just an indie game on the 3DS.
Automaton Lung's tutorial level
In Automaton Lung, you play as a robot-girl exploring unsettling, sprawling environments. You collect chips while battling low-poly enemies, some of them being so low-poly they’re just cubes.
The environments are a throwback to early 3D gaming, almost like walking through a Nintendo 64 game or an old-school TF2 community map. It’s got this haunting, post-apocalyptic vibe, kinda like Shadow of the Colossus, where you get the feeling there used to be something more, but now it’s just digital ruins, making it feel like you’re intruding on something that’s not meant to be disturbed.
The game plays pretty well, and it feels very Megaman Legends inspired. It has the only good stylus aiming ever made. It also has some fun movement mechanics with the dash and the surfboard (or whatever that thing is). I've heard that it looks unfinished, but that's mostly because of this game’s aesthetics; the gameplay itself feels really good.
If you have a 3DS, you should definitely give this game a try, it’s pretty fucking cool.
As I age regressed to my 15-year-old self, eating off-brand snacks and drinking coke, a thought crossed my mind: though a lot of these games were unpolished, someone took time and effort to make these. And it was probably so fun, much like the games I made as a teen, they weren’t a “why” and yes, a “why not?”.
You should hack your 3DS, it's pretty easy if you have a computer, and it lets you do a lot of cool stuff. Video games are awesome, and every person in the world should make one, so we would have 7 billion bad games.