Nintendo 3DS Vs. Mobile Phones! - Rerez

This piece from the Rerez vault was originally written in November 2015 back when the Switch was a twinkle in Nintendo’s eye.

I am a huge huge fan of portable video game consoles like the Game Boy, Game Gear and Neo Geo Pocket. Right now on the market place there are very few video game consoles out there that are portable. There is the PlayStation Vita but Sony really isn't doing anything with that anymore and the other system on the market is the 3DS which is possibly one of the best portable video game systems ever made. But you know what really sucks? To play video games on cell phones. See something like the 3DS is way better and here's five reasons why.

Number one better games. If I had to choose which platform had better games, the 3DS or the cell phone market, I definitely choose the 3DS. I don't care how many free-to-play nonsense games you can throw at me. No money at all to play but a whole bunch of money to actually get into the game and play? Not into it. Even when you get really cool experiences on the cell phone they always use touch controls and they're really difficult to play. And a lot of the games don't have really good budgets behind them so they just feel like these really cheap, quick, fast to play games which I really don't enjoy. On the 3DS you have Ocarina of Time, Ocarina of freaking Time! One of the greatest video games ever made. How is this even a competition?

Number two free-to-play sucks. Speaking of things I hate, free-to-play games oh god do I hate free-to-play games. See a bunch of the games you get on the 3DS are games you go out and buy. I know you're probably thinking, oh I gotta spend money on something so it's not as good as getting a free game. Well it's not true. Free-to-play games aren't really free. You start them up and maybe they put you in some delay time thing where you have to wait a couple of weeks to get a factory fortress to build your tanks to defeat the enemy or maybe you have to drop down five or ten dollars every time you want a single unit to roll over this war field and kill a bunch of people. Whatever it is those games are not really free-to-play. They're free to start but pay to play as you go along and I absolutely hate those games. They're not fun and they're not enjoyable and every game I played on the 3DS doesn't feel bad like that. Every single game even the kinda just mediocre ones are games that at least had some effort and time put into them. And they're just better experiences. Yes they cost a little bit more money up front but you know what good things usually do cost money. So that's why I think free-to-play games suck.

Number three better controls. Touchscreens are really good on cell phones for things like zooming in and out of pictures and swiping left and right on your tinder profile. But one of the things they're not good for is being gaming input devices. See on a 3DS you have hard inputs like a directional pad, buttons and stuff like that. And there even is a touch screen that you can use in certain instances. But on a cell phone you're limited to just the touch screen and that sucks because when it comes to games that require precise input a touchscreen just can’t give that to you. A touchscreen simply isn't that precise and that really sucks. Number four it's cheaper. The 3DS is a pretty affordable video game system. I know a lot of people out there probably never thought about that before but it's not that expensive. At most, depending on what region you live in, it can cost $200 to maybe $300 but a cell phone can cost way beyond that. So if you really had to compare a 3DS purchase to a cell phone purchase well little cell phones are always going to be way more expensive than getting a 3DS. If you're buying a cell phone just to play video games on it you're insane.

Number five it will last longer. Once upon a time I bought a cell phone from a company that was inspired by a fruit. Now this company made a really good phone. It was capable of making excellent phone calls, doing really good text messages with my friends and I was able to take pictures with it as well. And I assumed at the time that I'd be able to buy a bunch of video games that would last me for years. But I was wrong. See when you get a 3DS you can buy games on cartridges and the 3DS isn't going to be updated to a point where those games won't work on the cartridge based platform. They'll just keep working. Every game I own on the 3DS will be able to work in the next couple years. As long as I own a 3DS those games are going to work. But on iOS and even on Android that is not the case. If you buy a game on iOS or Android that game may be updated in a couple of years when they update the operating system. See this is a huge, huge problem with cell phone games in general. When they're produced they're produced for a very specific time on a very specific piece of hardware on a specific operating system and once any of those things go out the window the ability for that game to work may just not happen anymore. I've got tons of games that I've purchased on iOS that do not work anymore and that really pisses me off. There were so many games that I sunk a lot of money into that I have no way to play simply because the developers didn't update the games after the operating system got updated or because I moved to a new generation of hardware. Every game that I've purchased on iOS and Android has the potential to completely be lost in time because they simply cannot stay updated. That's something you don't have to worry about with the 3DS. And those are my five reasons why I personally believe the 3DS is a far better system to play and buy video games on when compared to cell phones.

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