Just please not touchscreen controls again, as it drove me nuts having to look back and forth between screens. If you never played it: imagine if you had to look at your controller every time you wanted to push a button, meanwhile losing track of what's happening on your TV, then looking back at your TV and being in a hurry to react, but then having to look for the controls again to be able to do so, meanwhile losing track of what's happening on the TV again, and so on.

Well, originally they were making a profit on the 3DS when they gave us these freebies with the system, but then there was the drastic price cut, so I don't think Nintendo could afford to take the hit of giving away any more games for free with the system.

Maybe it's just that I always have Tetris on the brain, but I always think of this game as constructing tetrominoes, which I find more interesting than just lining things up like Columns or Dr Mario. The Scenario mode can be beaten by luck rather than skill though, and it's not very engrossing, so it's kind of weird that something called Exercise mode feels like it's the real heart of the game. It's definitely worth the $3 though.

Yeah, I had a surprising amount of fun, despite waiting over an hour and a half to try out Mario Kart 8. The streetpasses were awesome, I played MK7 with a big group of people, and the loot was great too. They should have had more demo stations, so people could try all 4 games though.

I don't think there's really a difficulty spike. On easy, you can basically just mindlessly fill up columns and count on things to clear by chance, so the speed barely matters, but even with more colours, there's time to shift after touching the stack, so even though the speed looks fast, it's still quite playable, especially if you're consistently clearing stuff to buy yourself extra time and take advantage of the piece preview to plan ahead.

Nice, I wasn't expecting any earlier than December, but I guess they probably want it out for Black Friday.

Yo, we need this in Canada too, Nintendo.

Everyone buy Picross e right away so they hurry up and release the 2nd one.

I'm no artist, but I'm looking forward to seeing the miiverse postings.

I couldn't access it from Nintendo's site at first, so came to Nintendo Life, but it was lagging like crazy, so I went back to Nintendo's site and got the stream there finally. It was still lagging like crazy, and then it suddenly went off air about 40 minutes in when it should have ended, but it wasn't at the end yet. I had to rewatch the entire thing on youtube after, and there was about 8 minutes that Nintendo had never bothered to stream at the end, I'm guessing because I was 8 minutes behind from all the lag when it actually ended.

Better than I was expecting!

Finally!!!

Nice price on Mean Bean Machine. I hope we get it in NA this week too.

I want 3DS Contra so bad it's not even funny. I'd even settle for a Wii U Contra though.

This list isn't that disappointing to me, nor surprising, if true.

Thanks to Iwata and multiple systems, I now have every single puzzle piece, mwa ha ha.

I don't think anyone is better at NES Tetris. It might not look as impressive as people playing the newer Tetris games, but it's actually much more difficult than it looks. The lack of hard drop makes it look slower than it is, and also the pieces lock almost the instant you touch the stack, so you'll be lucky to shift them one column or do one rotation, whereas current games usually let you do 15 rotations/translations after touching the stack before the piece locks. Also, there's no hold function to save you, and no 7-bag randomizer to make sure you get I pieces. Personally, I find NES Tetris a bit harder than the original GB Tetris, because it's faster so you have to tap even faster to move the pieces or master how to keep the momentum for your pieces to move sideways, but NES Tetris does give you more rows to work with.

I love 60 fps and 3D, so this is great that you don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

I really only want another Punch-Out, but for 3DS this time.

99 cents a month sounds really cheap, but for how much it would add up to over the years, it's not worth it to me for how little I would probably use it. I only ever posted 2 flipnotes for the DSiWare version. I'll just share with my friends, but it's disappointing we can only share with 20 and not our whole friends list of 100.

It's really not the best reward. The fact it sold out so fast just goes to show how limited rewards are these days. They seem to be more interested in us redeeming for downloadable games than offering new physical rewards in any quantity.

I regret even downloading the demo — still won't buy it, no matter how low they go.

And let me guess: it will be cheaper on Vita than Wii U.

I bought it from Best Buy: unfortunately, it was bestbuy.ca.

I wonder whether people were just waiting to see what the competition had to offer before taking the plunge to get a Wii U, or if people were really so horrified by the announcement that they suddenly decided to get a Wii U after having no intention of getting one before. It might explain why Wii U sales have been so poor since launch if only the diehards were willing to take the leap of faith and get a Wii U not knowing what MS and Sony would offer.

I'd totally get Space Harrier, not sure about Altered Beast.

The more I learn about this game, the more I want to avoid it.

I don't suppose the lag is helping the controls, but I feel like the jump is completely out of control and it's impossible to navigate the small platforms in the vertical sections. I feel like I'm just jumping around like a moron and falling back down more often than I manage to successfully climb. I played the game for over and hour and it still never felt natural. I gave it 2/5 on the eShop, because the controls are so clunky it's not even worth playing in my opinion.

"tight controls"? The clunky controls are the biggest downpoint of this game for me.

I love this game, but I'm glad I have the 3D Classics version instead.

This has always been my favourite of the NES SMBs. I love the graphics, music, bosses, magical doors, and different characters.

Hmmm, also just remembered the DDP makes the digital version effectively more like $18 than $20, so that's a bigger price difference than I was thinking originally.

Getting both for my birthday on the 30th. Thanks, Nintendo!

Been waiting for Columns for a while now.

Hmm, I wound up buying NSMBU only because they announced this DLC, but then now there's a standalone version. Maybe I should just play through NSMBU and then sell it to get the standalone copy. I usually don't keep my Mario games these days, and if I get the downloadable version I'm stuck either keeping NSMBU to play it or not being able to sell NSLU if I do decide to get rid of NSMBU.

As someone who regularly turns on french subtitles while watching movies for the education/amusement, I'd call that a feature rather than complain about not being able to turn it off. It's not even like there's that much text in the game anyway.

Going to have to get Runner 2, and might as well get Super Mario World and SMB2 too.

I could understand not including the feature out of simplicity, but removing it seems homophobic. I'm disappointed in Nintendo.

@6ch6ris6 Went back and played it, and it had 2 distinct music tracks that it alternated. The first one is just over 4 minutes, and the second one is just under 2 minutes. It never really got on my nerves, but 5 music tracks would definitely be an improvement.

I'm not sure how many music tracks the original had, but it wasn't just the same music the whole time, so I don't think it's fair to say it only had one music track: it's just I don't think you could control which music it played and it would loop from one music track to the next automatically.

Still can't decide whether to rebuy this. 5 new music tracks sound worth it, but I wasn't expecting to get less game content.

I'll probably get SpeedX, assuming it's actually worth owning if I have the original (something I'll wait for the review to determine).

Hmm, guess I should just finish playing my Mario vs DK games before considering this.

I knew this would be bad. I can't believe they priced this above $2.

I'm waiting to do my Wii to Wii U transfer specifically because of LostWinds. I hope they sort out the problem before my Wii fails and I lose everything. It's been nearly 6 months.

I'm surprised they didn't at least find a boring use for it in Wii Fit.

I'm so happy about the Marvel pinball tables being on sale. That tank game has my interest too.

I don't even like Mega Man, but this casing looks awesome.

This guy needs to get a Fujifilm 3D camera, so he can snap quality photos of the world around him. Even for someone that can see 3D normally, I think these pictures surpass the normal experience of 3D vision, because it shoots everything in the foreground and background in extremely sharp focus, and then even if you can really only make your eyes converge to overlap the images for one depth at a time, you're still simultaneously seeing a sharpness to everything else in the foreground and background because your eyes are really only having to focus light that is all coming the same distance from the screen.