alt Hacker NewsI’m curious why people have started using the 3DS as the gateway device for ports of games, like Melee and F-Zero X.
Don’t get me wrong, the 3DS is a gem of a console, and it harks back to when Nintendo put more thought into what they released instead of just another Mario sports game; but since the Switch is so much more powerful, I’d expect ports to that be more of a priority.
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The Switch is powerful enough it could just straight emulate an N64 game if it needed to. It has a huge back catalog of games where it does this. It's basically a computer on the level of a mobile phone or tablet, or a laptop from 15 years ago.
The 3DS is still a _console_, purpose built and limited in what it can do. It is also approachably easy to find a good one in working order, and still has the vibe of a retro console.
Also, for fun, I suspect.
The 3DS has the novelty of 3D. I always wanted to play F-Zero in this form factor and it seemed like a reasonable port to accomplish.
One non-obvious reason might be that it's the only handheld console with a natively 240p height screen. This means all the 2d ui elements will remain crisp at the same size as they would be on original hardware.
I would guess the 3DS is far more "jailbroken" than the switch.
The N64 dev scene seems to be taking off too. If I had to guess, working around limitations in hardware are the fun part for a lot of people.
Not sure why others are doing it, but the switch is kind of a boring console imo. You may as well just use one of the million PC handhelds with the same form factor, and persistent hacks require a hardware mod.
The 3DS is a fun pocketable form factor which a lot of people already own and easy to permanently mod on any firmware version or hardware revision.