No GBA games on eshop for the 3DS. Kind of a bummer.
They are still working on bringing GBA games to the 3DS eShop. Though they did give us early adopters a bunch of GBA titles for free a while back:
[INDENT][ul]
[li]Metroid Fusion
[/li][li]Mario vs. Donkey Kong
[/li][li]Mario Kart: Super Circuit
[/li][li]Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3
[/li][li]WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$!
[/li][li]The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
[/li][li]Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
[/li][li]Wario Land 4
[/li][li]F-Zero: Maximum Velocity
[/li][li]Kirby & the Amazing Mirror
[/li][/ul]
[/INDENT]
Note that while no one mentions this, part of the reason GBA games aren’t available for purchase on 3DS is because it’s not capable of emulating them; the ones mentioned above use an incredibly hacky solution involving the system’s DS hardware, and have all the same limitations DS games do when played on a 3DS. As far as the SNES stuff, there’s no evidence either way, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it really is a matter of the 3DS not quite being powerful enough to emulate SNES games at full speed.
In both cases, it comes down to Nintendo not wanting to sell emulated games that don’t run perfectly, and really, can you blame them?
No, I’m just amazed that the hardware is that hard to emulate at speed lo these 20 years later.
I would be curious to hear from folks who were part of the ambassador program how those GBA games they were given play in their 3DS system. If they are really are so much worse to play there. For myself, I still keep my old GBA SP for playing my favorites like the Metroid games and Minish Cap, but of course that isn’t an option for everyone. Seems like hacked ROMs of GBA games would be better than nothing and I bet folks would pay for the opportunity.
They play perfectly well, pretty much like DS games do. In fact they work the same way; if you hold ‘start-select’ when starting one the screen appears in it’s original size rather than up-scaled. It is not ‘emulating’ like the virtual console games are, it’s ‘simulating’ and running the game directly on the 3DS’ DS chip.
Yeah, that’s mostly an indictment of the hardware choices Nintendo made. The PSP could emulate many SNES games very well, and it’s 10 years old.
That’s a misrepresentation of the situation; via homebrew, the PSP emulates SNES (and GBA) games “decently,” but not “very well,” and certainly not at a commercially-acceptable level. The Wii “should be” more than powerful enough to emulate SNES, and there are plenty of homebrew SNES emulators for it to fill the gaps in the Wii VC, but some of those gaps were because of unsatisfactory emulation of expansion chips, not because Nintendo arbitrarily decided they didn’t want to sell these games. (The rest were mostly because of licensing, which of course is the biggest issue with selling old games.)
Incidentally, even PC SNES emulators choke on certain games. It’s annoying needing two separate programs installed because one or the other has issues with a specific game I want to play, which is part of why I stopped dealing with it and started buying real cartridges.
My experience has been that SNES emulation on the PSP (basically ports of PC emus) was an under-performer that could not handle Mode 7, complex stuff like Super Mario RPG, or twitchy things like Yoshi’s Island. [yes I own the carts] Genesis stuff was much smoother on PSP emus.
In contrast, the final versions of GBA emulators for the PSP were pretty playable. The GBA ports of games like Super Mario World worked better than the SNES games on the same PSP. Mario Pinball Land played just as well on a PSP as on a GBA, a game that I would expect to punish the player harshly for any lag or underperformance.
Man, am I glad I picked this up. I vaguely recalled it getting good press somewhere, and I recall there being enthusiasm for finally having a Kid Icarus game, but that’s about all I recall. I’ve just barely started (Just got through the three headed monster stage… so Stage 3 I think?), but this game plays fantastically well. I couldn’t figure out why they included the DS stand with it until I got the first bit of hand fatigue from playing it without… I think the control scheme has to be what it is, but it is awkward for a “handheld” system, particularly the 3DS XL which is reasonably heavy, to only have one hand to hold it with. Still, despite that (and the stand holds the XL just fine which is nice!), the gameplay and controls on this are really, really nice. First rails shooter I’ve played in quite a while that I really liked to play. Reminds me of the feeling I got way back when (and I do mean WAY back) while playing Afterburner II in the arcades.
Looks like there’s a decent bit of depth with the powers and the intensity level stuff and the weapon combining and all that, too.
I think the 3DS was definitely a good choice. Though after about an hour of trying to make it work, I can’t figure out why all the praise for the Phoenix Wright games…