Nintendo Badge Arcade
Year: 2015
Rating: E
Time Played: 6,490 minutes / 108.17 hours
Don’t let the enormous amount of playtime fool you. Free games on the Nintendo 3DS (like Pokémon Shuffle, Pokémon Rumble World, and Pokémon Picross) rewarded playing regularly, and this one certainly tried its hardest to get me to pay for more playtime. I get why people lose a ton of money on actual claw machines, since this game is basically a digital version of these devices. The desire to collect all the “badges” from each machine kept me playing for a long time—well after the game itself had stopped being updated.
The enticement of free plays each day made me value the occasional bonus tries that I’d get for playing the practice machine in the lobby. The problem was, even with extra plays, there were some machines that had badges arranged in such a way that it couldn’t be cleared without purchasing more tries. When the extra free tries dried up when the 3DS eShop closed, I lost the motivation to keep playing. Granted, I had collected over 1,000 of the games badges by that point, so I got as close to completing the game as I think a reasonable free player could get.
Perhaps what made this game special was that the badges you’d earn in this game were used to decorate the main menu of the 3DS. Of course, I never used even close to a fraction of the badges I earned, but I could see the appeal considering how much blank space I have on my home screen. Still, locking unique decoration icons behind a paywall (and playwall, since you still had to play the game to get them) felt a little sketchy, especially coming from Nintendo.
A novelty game to unlock 3DS decoration icons, I give Nintendo Badge Arcade 3.0 stars out of 5.
