Arguably one of the most surprising bits of video game news from the last few months has been the terrible initial sales and rushed price reduction of the 3DS. Most news sites are blaming the gimmicky 3D and the crop of eyesight destroying horror stories that have alienated the system from children. While true these are not the cause of bad sales. The cause of the bad sales is completely due to the lack of good games. This viewpoint is usually met with cries of, "but there are plenty of good games for the 3DS! Look at Zelda and Star Fox and Cave Story! Those are GREAT games!" The response being that those are not great games, those WERE great games. Ocarina of Time and Star Fox were great games 12 years ago. The 3DS has seen one of the biggest droughts of new titles since the introduction of the PS3. Which brings me to the main point of this article, the 3DS has no Meteos.
For those who don't know, Meteos is a relatively simple puzzle game released about halfway thorough 2005 (6 months after the release of the DS). The objective of the game being to line up identical blocks by dragging them vertically; which causes a rocket to attempt to push the blocks off the screen. I would be wasting breath by saying anything else about the game though, because if you bought a launch DS there is a great chance that this game is sitting proudly in your collection somewhere. Meteos was one of the first great original games to be released for the DS and was met with rave reviews and great sales for the time. The game was a unique use of the DS that filled in the gap between crappy launch titles and big name releases. It quickly faded into obscurity but played a major part in keeping people playing their DS. A feat that Nintendo was unable to do on their own.
So now the 3DS is here and it has no saving grace. Nobody has bought a 3DS because the only things to play on it are remakes and 300$ is a pretty steep price for a game you have already played. There has been nothing unique to the 3DS or the gaming community, the past 10 years have taught me to always bet on Nintendo but this time my faith is wavering.
