A gaming friend of mine alerted me to a new feature that Nintendo added to the Japanese eShop: the Collectable Badge Center. Complements to Nintendo, they always manage to come up with something new and innovative. And this new feature to add to your 3DS’s homescreen is all kinds of quirky, like only Nintendo can come up with. Time for me to buy myself a bigger SD card, because when I tried to download this fun gadget I saw I’d reached the limit of my 4GB card.
Anyway, popped in a new 32GB card and I was on my way. It will take me some time to figure out everything I can do in the app, but what I’ve see so far is great. You play a little mini game using a catcher crane of the kind you see in arcade machines to pluck out the items you would like. They have pins, customized app icons and badges, and being an animal crossing fan I was happy to see a lot of those around. Of course, lots of Mario and Mario Kart images and some Famican images too. From what I’ve gathered though, they will add new images regularly too.
The app itself and the first five plays are free, and as you can see coming, it’s so easy to spend ¥90 (about $0.75) for five more additional plays. And when you’ve had five tries, you’ll find that the one image you won’t is still slipping out of your grip, so you spend some more money. That’s how it was for me anyway. And with that, I managed to change my homescreen into something unique that no one else has. I’ve exchanged my regular app icons for camera, setting, music and such for animal crossing icons. Plus I can download homescreens where the images in it have to be won in the mini game, how cool is that!
if you wanna see more, see this video. Let’s hope it finds its way West too!
I didn’t think of it as much when I saw it in the eShop, but it’s such a great idea!
I usually play the practice game until I get enough badges for a free game or until I win a special badge there, but I’ll admit that it’s quite addictive and I spent some money for a few times already.
This has a lot of potential.
So you have a a Japanese 3DS as well? The app is a little addictive, and I like how my homescreen now looks with app icons from animal crossing. I’m convinced they’ll bring it west too!