I'm a Dinosaur!

Claire and I have finally transformed into one of those elderly couples, who sit up in bed and read, occasionally turning their heads to comment on interesting stuff happening in their books. Or however that works. Except our books are portable consoles and our reading material consists of demos, videos and a bizarre life simulator.

Nintendo is weird. Everyone, myself included, is happy to make fun of EA and Ubisoft for farting out the exact same games over and over again, as well as releasing tons of overpriced DLC for their games. Last night I spent five Quid to unlock Cloud Strife in the 4th Smash Bros. game. And if I wanted all the additional stages, costumes and characters, I could spend more money on DLC than what I had to pay for the game itself. And we're on which Mario Kart now? Eight? And don't get me started on their DLC...

Yet I didn't hesitate to fork out some real cash to put Ryu and his stage in my portable game, which I'll probably never even look at a couple weeks from now. Funny how that works.

Perhaps I'm so okay with throwing lots of money at Nintendo, because they also do a lot of things right. Fucking demos, for instance! Remember when you could fucking try a game before you shelled out a ton of money on something you might not even like? Without pirating it, that is? There used to be a time where playable demos were a pretty common thing - or so I've learned from ancient cave paintings. And apparently this is also a thing on the 3DS. Awesome!

I have spent hours trying all kinds of games on there. Surprisingly, the new Sonic Game (the one with the hideous, malformed characters) is actually really fun to play. There's also a crazy cat lady simulator, which couldn't possibly be any less realistic. The cats on there are friendly, happy, they eat their expensive brand name cat food without drama and you can freaking walk them using only a laser pointer. The demo cat looked exactly like one of our cats. I uninstalled the demo five minutes later and cuddled the real cat. She hated it. Life is good.

If I offer my real cat the same brand of food twice in a row, she'll turn her ass on it and do a burying motion. True story!

But we didn't just dick around on weird game demos. There's also a new anime channel in the 3DS home menu, which plays crap like Pokemon episodes and the cringeworthy Kirby show. I always thought games turned cartoon show served to sell a product, but I actually kind of hate Kirby after watching the first episode of that nonsense. But everything was better after we watched I'm a Dinosaur!

It explains all cool dinosaur facts in a funny, easy to understand fashion. Ancient monster lizards never looked cooler! And kids will like it too, I suppose.

We've also bet some (virtual) money on a bunch of live battles happening around the world on Super Smash Bros. Amazing stuff, really. There was always a match about to start, never any delays in between or during battles. I suspect we were really just watching replays of recent matches rather than having them live-streamed as they happened, but it was still a pretty cool feature. It's fun to see what other players can do on there. And things get infinitely more interesting when you bet on somebody and hope for them to win.

Wanna know what new content is coming up for Smash Bros.? Here's some lag-free high quality video showing all the new characters and costumes in all detail! We've also spied on our sleeping Miis in Tomodachi Life and shot each other's faces in some weird built-in minigame thing that lets you shoot faces. It also plays all our favourite Xtube videos.

Yeah, I know. This thing is basically a smartphone with better games and without the phonecalls. I can awkwardly update my Facebook status on there using the stylus or I can watch Youtube videos on a much smaller screen using a much lower resolution than my PC. And it doesn't exactly run Dragon Age or Warframe, either. But who gives a fuck? We have Mario Kart. Heh.