Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, Starwhal arrive for Nintendo platforms via eShop

By Danny Cowan September 24, 2015

Nintendo 3DS - Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer PAX Trailer

A new 3DS-exclusive entry in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series heads up this week’s eShop update, accompanying newly released digital titles like

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Extreme Exorcism and Beatbuddy.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer, also available at retail, challenges players to furnish and design homes for their virtual town’s animal residents. Successful designs unlock new apparel and furniture, expanding future interior decoration possibilities.

Happy Home Designer features support for Nintendo’s newly released amiibo cards, which add standout series characters like K.K. Slider and Tom Nook to the player’s list of residents when scanned. Currently, only New Nintendo 3DS hardware has built-in NFC scanning technology; legacy 3DS consoles require an NFC reader peripheral in order to access data stored on amiibo cards.

This week also marks the release of a new Animal Crossing 3DS system theme and a demo version of Mercenaries Saga 2 for Nintendo’s portable console.

Over on the Wii U, indie developer Golden Ruby Games makes its platform debut with Extreme Exorcism, a retro-styled arena combat game for up to four players. Player input in Extreme Exorcism is recorded during battle, and subsequent matches challenge players to avoid a deadly poltergeist that reenacts their performances in previous rounds.

The interstellar marine mammal action game Starwhal also arrives on the Wii U this week, boasting a new 5-player mode exclusive to Nintendo’s platform. Controlling a floppy, sluggish space narwhal, players attempt to pierce the hearts of their opponents using their forehead-mounted horns.

Other new games hitting the Wii U this week include the rhythm-driven puzzler Beatbuddy, side-scrolling platformer Job the Leprechaun, sci-fi turn-based adventure game Nova-111, and the pacifism-themed space shoot-’em-up Hold Your Fire: A Game About Responsibility.

Nintendo’s Virtual Console lineup additionally expands this week with The Ignition Factor, a Super NES firefighting game originally published by Jaleco in 1995.

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Danny’s passion for video games was ignited upon his first encounter with Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, and years later, he still…

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Grab these Nintendo 3DS games before the eShop closes

wii u 3ds exclusive nintendo games eshop closure ever oasis

While the Nintendo 3DS had a rocky launch, the handheld system recovered gracefully and ended up having one of the best game lineups of any Nintendo system. Many of these 3DS games, like Super Mario 3D Land and Fire Emblem Awakening, were very popular and well-known. Still, the 3DS had a lot of fantastic games that not as many people know about and threaten to be lost to time when the eShop closes down.
The 3DS eShop will shut down soon, preventing people from purchasing new games. As such, we've been reflecting on the system's vast library and all of the fantastic games that 3DS owners will no longer be able to buy digitally. From games that we think will skyrocket even further in price after the store shuts down to some enjoyable hidden gems that didn't get the attention they deserve, you might want to snag these 3DS games before you can't anymore after March 27.
Ever Oasis

Grezzo is one of Nintendo's most underrated developers. It's delivered top-notch The Legend of Zelda remakes like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and Link's Awakening. So what if I told you that it used that experience to make an original IP for 3DS that's one of the best-looking and expansive games on the system? Ever Oasis, a 2017 3DS game, follows a young kid as they help a water spirit named Esna build an oasis and try to save their brother from Chaos.
The result is a mix of 3D The Legend of Zelda and city management games. Players can venture out into surprisingly large open worlds and dungeons to restock and grow the number of "bloom booths." This mix of open-world exploration, dungeon crawling, and oasis-building will keep players engaged for dozens of hours, and it also stands as one of the deepest and best-looking action-adventure games on the platform.
Ever Oasis didn't get much attention when it launched because the Nintendo Switch had been released a couple of months earlier. Still, it stands as one of the 3DS' best games, so it's a shame that more people don't know about it. It risks being forgotten forever now the 3DS eShop is closing down, so check it out before the closure; it will surpass your expectations.
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Nintendo’s Wii Shop Channel and DSi shops are back online

Nintendo 3DS close-up.

After months of service outages, Nintendo's Wii Shop Channel and DSi Shop are back online.

Nintendo's two virtual marketplace services went down in March of this year. In a statement to Kotaku on the outage, Nintendo acknowledged the downtime but had nothing to report other than that the shops were undergoing maintenance and that it would provide updates on them at a later date. It seems it completely skipped the update and simply put both back online instead.

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Nintendo’s eShop is currently unavailable in Russia

Nintendo Switch OLED model

Nintendo's eShop is currently down in Russia, following a decision made by the payment service used by the company to stop accepting Russia's currency, Rubles.

According to the Russian Nintendo eShop page, the eShop is currently in "maintenance mode." It doesn't seem like the decision to shut down its eShop in Russia was made by Nintendo however, but rather by another company that handles the shop's transactions. Nintendo has notably kept quiet regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine, whereas its peers in the game industry have openly taken measures to limit or entirely halt the sales of their products in Russia.