as a kid, i had a weird history with portable game systems. my first ever one was technically a blue Leapster L-Max, though that was more eye candy than it was game system. (did you know that that system runs all of its software on Adobe Flash, by the way? that blew my mind when i found it out recently.) my sister had a Gameboy Advance SP that i played a couple times as a kid, though she mostly had licensed games for it, and none of them really grabbed me. it's hard to get excited for Chicken Little or Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed for GBA, even as a 5 year old. she later got a DS lite, though she wouldn't dare let me touch it. i got to watch her play Nintendogs and Guitar Hero: World Tour a couple times, but neither of those really caught my eye either. however, in 2010 she got a black DSi for her birthday, and gave me her DS lite as a handmedown. i played it quite a bit, mostly using it to play Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, but that was the only good game i had for it, and then some kid at school stole it from me, so it was back to Chicken Little after that. i got Super Mario 64 DS at one point and played that a lot, but i'd say my first real portable was the 3DS.

for my birthday in 2011, my parents got me a flame red original 3DS, and it was the first (non-educational) videogame system that was entirely my own. i remember the first three games i got for it were Cave Story 3D, Rayman 3D, and Cubic Ninja. three pretty infamous games, though all for different reasons. i personally really like Cave Story 3D, i think the 3D backgrounds add a lot to the atmosphere of each area and sort of give more context as to what the area is even supposed to be. it also adds a couple of new areas that i really like, and i don't think the models look that bad. people really overblow how "bad" CS3D looks, honestly. Rayman 3D is often considered to be one of the shoddiest ports of the game, but it was 100% serviceable to a kid like me. i didn't notice the blown out audio or the one lum you can't collect because a web wasn't given the property that lets you climb on it, i just thought "ooooh Rayman!" was kind of a culture shock when i went to my friend Mark's house and saw him play the same game on his N64, but that's besides the point. and yes, as a kid i owned Cubic Ninja long before it was discovered to be this key part to hacking the 3DS. i should really replay that game sometime and write a review... but this is all besides the point. i loved this system as a kid, and took it with me everywhere. how has it held up over the past 13 years?

like any handheld loved by a kid would. looking at the shape this thing ended up in, you'd have thought i'd brought it into a warzone. but nope, it just spent a lifetime in the hands of a rowdy kid demon, and barely lived to tell the tale. so let's go down the list of issues this thing has. number one, charging. you might have noticed a bit of duct tape on the bottom of the system, and that's because of one big thing: the battery. one day (i wanna say in 2012 or 2013) i was going to go charge my 3DS. i plugged it in, plugged the charger into the wall, and... nothing. i asked my dad what was wrong, and he suggested i use the charging cradle that came with the system. yeah, the original 3DS came with a plastic charging cradle... for some reason. and unlike 90% of original 3DS users, i used this thing religiously. the charging cradle was my only way to charge my 3DS for a good few years, and so i was kind of forced into using it. eventually though, even that stopped working. you know how there's that little stick inside of the 3DS's charging port? i think it's what the cable actually connects to. yeah, that thing just broke out, and for some reason not even the cradle would work anymore. so i ended up taking to the internet, and someone suggested the Nyko battery pack+. it's a battery pack that has way more charging capacity than the stock battery, and also just so happens to use a completely separate method of charging from the normal 3DS: its own unique, terrible cradle that sucks. so i got that, installed it, and... it did the job. it does this weird thing where, if you turn the system off when the battery power is low, charge it in the cradle, then power it back on once its done charging, the battery indicator needs to catch up to the new battery level, and slowly goes from blinking red to solid red to blue over the course of like, 30 minutes. it was super weird, and made it hard to tell what level the battery was actually at. at some point wayyyy later in like, 2018, i dropped this 3DS, and this battery pack was so cheaply made that the screwposts that you use to keep it inside the 3DS (since it replaces the entire back) BROKE OFF. i didn't get very much money as a kid, like 10 bucks each month as allowance, so i couldn't just buy a new one. so i did the most arcade solution possible: i duct-taped the battery in! if you were wondering, that's what the duct-tape was for.

next issue: the A button! when i was younger we used to go to the pool in my neighborhood a lot, and i would bring my 3DS to pass the time during adult swim. (you know, even now as an adult, i really don't know what adult swim is even for. though being a trans girl makes me allergic to swimming, so i guess i just don't have the first hand experience.) on one of these pool visits it randomly began to rain, and we had to leave. as soon as we got home, i realized, "oh fuck, i forgot my 3DS!" (except i didn't say fuck because i was a kid) and my parents took me back to go get it. it was sitting out in pretty heavy rain, so i was fully expecting it to just be broken. we put it in a bag of rice, waited a day, and when i turned it on... it somehow worked just fine still, with one major issue: the A button didn't register every time i pressed it. it worked like, 75% of the time, but it was just broken enough to be noticable. but because i was a kid who didn't have the money to afford a replacement (or a family willing to replace it for me) i just sorta dealt with it. about 10 years later, i'd say the A button has gone from 75% to 10%. it's best to just bank on it never working, because it almost never does. however, even to this day, i'm pretty astonished it was completely fine otherwise. all of the other buttons still work perfectly fine, even the ones that are on the outside of the system like L and R, it's just the A button that went bad. way later on when i'd modded this 3DS, i got a program that felt tailored perfectly to my exact situation: a homebrew app that swapped the functions of the A and B buttons. the system became a lot more usable after that, with the exception of games that required frequent use of both.

third: the physical condition! your eyes may have been drawn to that huge scratch in the touch screen, or the maligned circle pad. the touch screen got that scratch from me losing my stylus and deciding an unfolded paperclip would work perfectly as a substitute. (hint: it didn't.) however, the circle pad situation was a bit more gradual than that. in 2018 i started using this 3DS again for modding purposes, and i still hadn't gotten out of my "ravenous little critter" phase. to make a long story short, my constant ADHD-fueled fidgeting lead to me picking at the rubber on the circle pad, and it eventually formed a hole. this was maybe the worst thing that could have happened, because when you give me an opportunity to rip into something like that, my brain is just going to do it without me thinking. over the course of a couple months i slowly tore the plastic more and more, until one day it just completely fell off. it goes deeper than that, however, because the circle pad has some more intense issues under the hood. i'm not sure what exactly caused it, but at one point it just started to feel... really stiff, and now it's impossible to move it to the right at all. again, i have zero clue as to the mechanical reason for this, since i'm too scared to open this thing up, but i'm curious to find out if anyone else might potentially know. if you do, shoot me an email. (motsdrama@proton.me) on top of all of that, however, there's another issue that crops up every now and then. one time as a kid, me and my family were on a road trip, and upon turning on my 3DS i saw this weird black splotch on the bottom right corner of the top screen. now that i think about it, it looked sort of like how a water damaged screen does. i learn to tune it out over time, and a couple months later i find that it's gotten... smaller. a few months after that, it's completely gone. then it comes back, even bigger than before. i have never seen anything like this on any other type of screen in all my years of messing with tech, so my guess is that it had something to do with the specific screen the 3DS uses to make its 3D effect work. other than that, i've got nothing. on top of all of that, the outer camera has this weird thing it does where when you try to take 3D pictures, it displays all in pink. i'm assuming this is also due to water damage.

for my birthday in 2015, my parents saw the sorry state my 3DS was in, and decided to get me a new 3DS XL to replace it. at the time the old 3DS wouldn't charge at all (this was before i got the battery pack) so i couldn't transfer my data to the new one. this caused a split, all of my downloaded games were on my old 3DS, but my new 3DS was actually functional. after getting the battery pack, i'd use my old 3DS to play the games i'd downloaded (Luigi's Mansion Dark Moon, Animal Crossing New Leaf, the DLC streetpass games i bought on there, my old DSiware and virtual console stuff, etc) while i'd use my new 3DS for physical cartridge games, as well as the new stuff i downloaded there. then, in 2018, the split became even larger when i decided to finally mod my 3DS. i didn't wanna fuck up my new, fancy 3DS, since i experienced the horrors of bricking a console with my old Wii, so i decided to use my old shitty 3DS as a guinea pig for modding, to make sure i had it all figured out. i also didn't have a microSD reader at the time, so i couldn't even mod my new 3DS if i wanted to. (fun fact: my first 3DS modding experience was a total nightmare. i remember spending an entire afternoon trying to get the homebrew channel installed, and it was entirely my fault. i figured, "oh, i own Cubic Ninja, i should totally mod my 3DS using that, it'd be really funny!" and that was the WORST way to do it, because every step of the process was so arcane, and i was a stupid middle schooler who sucked at everything at the time.) eventually, though, i did get it fully modded, and now the split was this: i used my old 3DS for playing cool homebrew stuff and DEFINITELY NOT PIRATING GAMES, while i used my new 3DS for if i wanted to have a better, less compromised experience. while it was objectively the worse console, i still used my old 3DS a lot to play stuff like WarioWare Gold, Luigi's Mansion (the remake) and other games i didn't have the money to buy. plus, at a certain point my new 3DS broke even more than my old one. the X, Y, B and R buttons were all busted to some degree, which was way worse to deal with than just the broken A button of the old one. out of all of this nonsense, however, the thing i find the funniest of all is the thing that didn't break: the hinge. i've heard so many people talk about the hinge on their DS or 3DS breaking over and over, and how it was the easiest thing to break in the whole lineup of systems, but even with how rough i was with this thing as a kid, the hinge has never given me any issue at all.

in 2019 i got the new 2DS XL for Christmas, and i transferred everything from my new 3DS to this system. i also took the initiative to mod it, since i felt a lot more comfortable doing that at that point, which left old reliable as being outclassed in every way. i now keep the red 3DS as a memento, and the most use it gets is for trading Pokemon between games. even still, i'm astonished it still turns on at all, and it'll always have a special spot in my heart. it carried me through the longest and most boring car trips, it was where i dumped hundreds of hours into Pokemon X, it was my first exploration into the handheld history of Nintendo with the Gameboy virtual console and the DSiware Game & Watch games. even in the sorry state its in now, i'll always love this ratty little machine, and all the memories i've made with it.