Doing this blogging gig, I get a lot of cool invites. I appreciate each and every one of them. In recent years, our life has gotten so busythat I haven’t been able to get to many things, but with this one, Iknew I couldn’t say no: a trip to Redmond to visit Nintendo Headquarters. With my boys!
Given that we’re a huge gaming family, you guys can imagine the reaction I got when I told my boys we would be going. And I’ve been gaming on Nintendo consoles for almost 30 years – from the NES Classic to the Wii U, so it’s possible I was as excited as they were.
We had the best time. In fact, both of my boys have now proclaimed that after college, they will be moving to Seattle and working for Nintendo. Heads up Nintendo HR people – expect their resumes and job applications sometime after 2026.
We had an awesome day learning some history about Nintendo, taking a tour and seeing some new product developments and release. Seeing as this trip was focused on the 3DS XL, we obviously saw and played around a lot with DS games. In fact, both of my boys got units and they have pretty much been playing them non-stop since!
We hadn’t been on a DS in awhile and I had forgotten the advantages it has to playing mobile games on your phone. For starters, the games are a lot more complicated and involved than most mobile games. Also, it’s nice to just get away from the phone. While some of the DS games have Wifi capability, they can all be played without Wifi.
We very much appreciated having these the day before we visited Nintendo when my husband and I took our kids around in the afternoon as we did some wine tasting.
Of course, while at Nintendo, we met some of our favorite characters:
I’m sure I’ll be bringing you some game reviews going forward as we learned about a lot of them! But one of the highlights for me was bringing home this NES Classic:
How many of you guys had one of these growing up? I know I sure did. I was an addict. Nintendo had set a few of these aside for us to buy in the store. Do you know it went on sale this week and sold out on Amazon in 60 seconds?
Hopefully more will become available because it’s a great price point – $59.95 – and has ALL of your old favorites on it including Zelda, Pac-Man, Dr-Mario & more. There are literally games on there that I didn’t remember but once my kids pulled them up I was screaming because I remember playing them! It’s a lot of fun and this is totally a great gift for a nostalgic gamer on your list. Here’s the link to find it on Amazon – at the time of this posting it’s sold out and people have seriously jacked the prices but keep an eye on it and hopefully more will become available.
Hot DS Game Picks for the Holidays
As far as DS games go, these are some of the ones we are excited about and to look for:
Pokemon Moon & Pokemon Sun – both releasing November 18th
Switch
We are also SUPER pumped about the Switch. It’s not coming until next March so we’ll all have to wait awhile. We didn’t get to see one yet but we watched the trailer (again, cuz my kids and I had already stalked it several times) and everyone’s buzzing about it. This definitely feels like the future of gaming – love the portability.
That’s it, for now! I’ll probably dive into some reviews as we get closer to the holidays of various games but wanted to bring you guys a quiet highlight as I know we’ve been quiet lately and this trip was epic!
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