I've started encountering the ad-blocker blocker myself over the past few days, but fortunately it proves to be terrible at its job in my experience, as a small X allows it to be dismissed after 3 or 5 seconds, which is outright better than waiting for the 5 seconds plus load time of a skippable ad, or the many more seconds of an unskippable ad or two. This might be useful for me if they ever decide to remove the ability to dismiss the ad-blocker blocker, though.

The 3DS did have a tool that let you transfer digital DSi applications from the DSi onto the 3DS, and same with the Wii U for Wii digital applications. Pretty sure they're also planning to retain the current Nintendo Account system for the next console as well, so I'd say digital backwards compatibility is just as safe a bet as physical backwards compatibility.

I know that full well - in animation and with other skins, just looks like normal contemplation rather than any degree of distress. It's just that the meme said it was distressed, so I rolled with that narrative rather than shooting it down with what I know about the game.

Not sure why the snowman's so distressed, given that it's a walking corpse itself.
(this is a screenshot from the game Dead Cells, where you play as a blob piloting a typically-headless corpse)

Well then. T'was certainly a Direct; forgive me for the coming wall of text, and if said wall of text comes off as a bit negative at times.

Tragically, the additional Side Order information mostly shoots down my stupid conspiracy theory that it's a sequel to Paper Mario Colour Splash. Though then again, we still don't know why the "Spire of Order" is devoid of colour, so it still could be the work of the straw-wielding Shy Guys (no it can't). Idiocy aside, the fact it's a rougelike is really interesting to me; I honestly just expected standard, pre-set single player campaigns to be the only major offerings of Splatoon 3's DLC, akin to such campaigns of the main games and 2's DLC. I do generally like rougelikes and did enjoy the first two Splatoons, so reckon I'd probably like this as well, but I never bought Splatoon 3 under the pretence it didn't change enough from 2 to justify existing on the same system, and I'm not shelling out for the game and DLC just to play the seemingly cool rougelike side mode.

I was NOT expecting Trombone Champ, of all games, to make use of the right joy-con's IR camera - been pondering about how relatively underutilised it is lately, though it's probably not the easiest thing to actually find a use case for. I suppose that using it as a controller fits with the insanity of Trombone Champ, though, and multiplayer looks like it'll be absolutely stupid in the best way possible. My sister already owns the Steam version, though, so probably won't get this one, hilarious as the Switch-specific controls look.

Considering that Mansion 3 is perhaps one of the best looking games on the Switch, Luigi's Mansion 2 HD looks profoundly manky to me. Really just looks like an upscaled version of the 3DS version, perhaps with smoother models and possibly Luigi's model snagged from 3, but since its first reveal and furthermore now, it's always looked more than a little manky. At least the Scarescraper's still there, though; in spite of never beating the main story of the 3DS original, I played mountains of Scarescraper.

F-Zero 99 looks kinda cool, and given it's free, I'll absolutely try it out, even if my few attempts at the original F-Zero via Smash 4 Wii U's Masterpieces and Switch Online SNES went terribly. The worry, of course, is that it'll be as short-lived as other 99 games like Super Mario Bros. 35 and Pac-Man 99, which would be a real shame for a series as famously content-starved as F-Zero.

I mentioned the IR camera's underutilisation earlier, and WarioWare also decided to use it for some microgames. So that's pretty cool. Don't particularly like Wario's voice acting, though; probably a consequence of Martinet stepping back from the role. While what we've heard of Mario's Wonder voice sounds good to me, this Wario voice... less so. Also a bit worried about how I'll play this game at all; definitely looks like it's best played docked, but I almost always play with the Switch in Handheld Mode, and my console misbehaves when trying to dock it (i.e: it does acknowledge it's been docked, but doesn't display on the dock screen). Could probably make use of my old spare Switch or my brother's instead, though.

There are only two question mark slots on the character select screen in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, so where are they going to stick the two extra characters they've introduced? Are they going to crush them, or some existing characters, into alternate costume slots? That aside, I do fear that given that only 4 Tour nitro tracks (ignoring the RMX courses) aren't in the Booster Course Pass yet, all 4 will appear in this final wave. While there have been some good Tour-originals throughout the Pass, they've been distinctly hit-and-miss, and the city tracks definitely blend together a bit with 12 of them in the game.

The appearance of the characters in the Thousand Year Door remake remind me of Sticker Star's key art (https://mario.wiki.gallery/images/5/54/PMSS_Mario_Shiny_Album.png), probably only because of the different segments/layers having their own depth to them. Also, the talking sound effects are quite funny to me, likely due to the fact that some are audibly existing sound clips cut apart, and the original game used the same ones for almost every character. Didn't play the original, though, and having played other RPGs in the past, like the Mario & Luigi games, I feel confident in the assertion that they're better as spectator sports for me.

All the other announcements, I don't really care that much about, and would probably just poke fun at if I were to speak on them.

From what I've heard, from January 2024, any for-profit game made in Unity that meet a certain profit and download threshold will have to pay a fee to Unity per install of said game, including those released before these changes are being introduced.

Having gotten it in the Steam Summer Sale, I'm on the verge of achievement completion for Hades - just reached the epilogue of the story after my 100th run, so I only need to get the last Cthonic Companion to get my last achievement.

On the side of the future, I've been thinking of replaying New Super Mario Bros. 2 for a few weeks now. Not because of Wonder's fairly imminent release; I just feel like revisiting the game again. Pretty sure I never even saw all the game's levels despite getting through the post-game World Star when I first played through the game, so that's probably a goal I could aim for if and when I finally decide to start this replay.

Huh! That took forever and a half, considering that the Switch and 3DS titles suffering the same vulnerability got fairly quick patches, though I suppose the Wii U was the first of these consoles to be discontinued, so was lowest priority. Good to see that people's fears that this was just a stealth way of shutting down these games' online play were misplaced, though.

Minecraft players when the chicken farm's a bit overpopulated.

I like* how the houses in Athens look like toy blocks. There's a joke to be made here about the Greek economy.
Not sure how I feel about the inclusion of Moonview Highway, though. The Booster Course Pass already has a great many city tracks thanks to all the ones ported from Tour, and Moonview, as a traffic course at night, feels like it fits into the same kind of aesthetic and functional theming that N64 Toad's Turnpike from the base game does. The music might end up carrying my opinion on the track, though, like how 3DS Alpine Pass' does.

For most of my time with my 3DS, I used a 4GB SD card, which I suspect came with the system itself. I almost never got non-demo games on the 3DS digitally, and most of the games I played weren't too abundant in the updates, so it was enough for my purposes, even if I was skirting at the edge of how much it could store. When I modded my 3DS shortly after hearing about the 11.17.0 firmware update, I figured I'd need an upgrade before modding it, so I went with a 32GB microSD card that was lying around in my house's storage tub, waiting to be used.