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When Nintendo created the 3DS, they included an interesting feature called Streetpass – when your 3DS comes into close proximity with another 3DS, data is shared. Some games use this to provide additional features ranging from decent to useless. Streetpass Plaza is the main hub of Streetpass. Here, you can keep track of everyone you meet, and participate in two free games.
It’s grown a lot over the years. Nintendo has updated this thing a few times. Now, you can complete a map of the world based on people you’ve encountered, or a list of accomplishments for the Streetpass games (as well as a jukebox so you can listen to this lovely collection of elevator music on the go!)
Some of these updates are free, but many of them are released as paid DLC. Some of it is worth it, some of it is not. It depends on how many different hats and costumes and speech bubble backgrounds you want for your Mii character so they can look cool when saying hello to other Mii’s you meet. One paid feature lets you collect everyone’s birthdays with prizes given out for completing certain objectives, like one hundred unique birthdays or completing a month and so on.
The main point of Streetpass Plaza is the mini games. The games are all designed to make use of the people you meet. You can use ten people at once, and that tends to be the best way to play. In the early days of Streetpass, I actually had to take my 3DS outside of the house and go to a shopping centre (and one time, a pop culture convention) to get my hits. But even though I live in Sydney, I might get 4-6 hits going out on a good day, and none if it was a bad day. Progress through these games could be excruciatingly slow. If you’re in an area where you barely get any hits at all, none of these games are worth the time and money. You can use the play coins to achieve most of the same results, but it’s a slow grind (and walk) to do it this way.
Even with a lot of hits, some of them still aren’t worth it. These mini games are a mixed bag. As much as I hate describing something as a mixed bag, this seems the best way to describe them. I’m not entirely sure what a mixed bag means, but in my mind, it means the collection of varied mini games I am about to describe to you. So, let’s do a list! The first two are free, the rest are all paid DLC.
Note, US and PAL titles for these games are often different, so I’m going to be nice and include both.
Nintendo will give out free pieces of new puzzles when they are released. They started with half a dozen, but now there are over sixty of the damn things. Each puzzle is made up of 15 to 40 pieces. Each person you meet on Steetpass will let you take one piece from them (assuming they have pieces you don’t have). At current count, there’s 1618 total pieces.
If you don’t have a steady stream of Streetpass encounters, this can take a while. You can use play coins to give you a random piece, but sometimes it will give you one you already have, because Nintendo are cruel like that. Some of the larger pictures have special pink pieces that can only be received from other people.
Once completed, you can view a 3D image of your favourite Nintendo properties. Some of them have elaborate animation to them, too. The images do look great, with the 3D providing a lot of depth. You can even tilt the control stick to move the perspective slightly.
When you create your Mii, you are asked to pick your favourite colour. Your Mii will then wear this colour shirt. Every Mii you encounter will be wearing a certain colour, which influences what they can do in each of the games. Be prepared for a lot of red and blue.
In this simple RPG, the colour of the shirt denotes what type of magic/skill they can use. You and your party of up to ten adventurers will fight monsters and other obstacles. Some enemies are weak against water, so you would cycle through your party to find a blue shirt that can use water magic. Most enemies can be cut down with a sword, though. Each time you encounter an individual Mii, they will level up in this game, so it pays to stalk the same group of people as much as possible.
Your reward for progressing through this game will be hats, hats and more hats. For your Mii.
A sequel was provided in a later update, which introduced branching paths and even more hats.
This is a SHMUP! It’s not going to be anywhere near as good as the Genesis classics you’re expecting. You fly a ship through space saving Mii’s who are trapped in air bubbles around the place. Once rescued, they provide your ship with a new weapon (depending on their shirt).
You can choose where on your ship to place the weapons, so in addition to moving through space, you will also need to rotate your ship so the best weapons face the opposition. If you get hit, you lose a weapon. Once you have no weapons, you are dead. This game can provide a reasonable challenge as there will often be enemies everywhere, and the bosses are huge and have specific weak points for you to expose.
Each level has additional objectives which l find unreasonable (collect all the treasure, don’t get hit!), but then again, I was never very good at this particular genre.
This is one of the best games in the plaza. You collect seeds and grow and cultivate plants, using selective breeding to produce flowers of new species and/or colours. You can create a garden to display your favourite plants, and there’s plenty of interesting pots to use, too.
The flower shop in town will provide specific requests. It’s often up to you to find the flower that suits the customer’s need (If thinking isn’t your style, and trial and error is not your style either, then the Internet has all the answers). There’s quite a few requests you can fulfil to earn prizes, and some of these can be a worthy challenge. There’s about 300 unique flowers in this game, so it’s a slow burner. It’s relaxing, though.
In Battle, you will build an army and attempt to conquer the world. As you achieve victories over your enemies, your army will grow. You will campaign against enemy generals across the land, but you will also meet the people you’ve encountered. You will fight enemy generals (or simply defer to them if their army is too big for you to realistically battle). If you win, you collect some of their troops (if you lose, the reverse). The battles are all basically three rounds of scissors (archers)/paper (infantry)/rock (cavalry). The size of your army is also a factor. Tactically, you will divide your army up into the three groups, and you can only use each part of the army once per battle.
In this game, you explore a haunted mansion. The floor plans are lost, so you create the map with pieces given to you by your Streetpass encounters – connect the same colours to make the rooms bigger, or have a bunch of different coloured hallways. You’ll also fight monsters from time to time, which aren’t that difficult. I like this one a lot, although the inventory management is atrocious. There are different weapons for different elements, and each monster has their own weakness. This means out of your 8 inventory slots, 5 will be taken up by different guns. And the game just keeps throwing guns at you constantly. You have an extended inventory of 99 and that fills up fast. So, at these glowing orb stations you will need to combine guns of similar types to level them up. I don’t think the game needed so many weapons – surely other items could be found in chests.
This is the opposite of survival horror – my Mii could outfit a small army with the arsenal I’ve gathered in this game.
This fishing game is good. Different coloured shirts bring you different types of bait. You go out on a boat to some beautiful fishing spots, and you cast your line and catch fish. Each spot has a specific fish you need to catch to unlock the next one. The mechanics of fishing are good – if you’ve played any other fishing mini game in other video games, you’ll pick this one up quickly. It’s more enjoyable than Ocarina of Time’s fishing mini-game, but not as relaxing as fishing in Animal Crossing. I’ve never played any game that was just about fishing, so I can’t make any comparisons there. Sorry.
This is basically a low budget Dead Rising. Your Mii encounters are scattered around town, and zombies are on the loose, so it’s up to you to rescue them. Each colour shirt provides a different weapon and you’ll use that to whack zombies until the weapon breaks. Each level has specific goals to try and achieve.
I hate this. It’s stupid and annoying. You race slot cars. You can accelerate or not accelerate. You accelerate to go fast, you take your finger off the A button when you’re on a red corner, or you crash. It sounds easy, but the camera does not make it easy to see what you’re doing. Your car doesn’t matter. The Mii encounters give you pieces after each race to make a temporary chip for your car to use next time. There won’t be a next time.
This is a very quick mini game. It’s quite easy. You get to play a day of trading. You buy stocks at a low price and try to sell them at a high price. Your encounters act as advisors, telling you when stock is likely to rise or fall. You’re given goals to reach certain milestones of money, and when you do, your reward is another milestone. You can unlock merchandise for your showroom, which seems to be mementos from the other StreetPass games.
Your encounters will bring you ingredients (based on the colour of their shirt) and it’s up to you to turn it into a delicious dish. You will be told to cook up a dish without a recipe (these come from experimenting with leftover ingredients). You can usually figure out the dish based on common sense and logic, or if that fails, just Google it. I tried to come up with some food puns and metaphors for this section, but it’s surprisingly difficult when you’re actually talking about food. By the way, the food graphics in this game are the second best I’ve ever seen in a game (the top spot being taken by Ignis’s delicious creations in Final Fantasy XV).
This sounds much cooler than it actually is. In this mini game, you shoot a ninja out of a cannon, and you have a very limited time to work out the trajectory needed to hit the various balloons, which you can move around. Hitting the balloons will provide you with the weapons you need to fight the enemy at the top of the cliff.
This one is pretty basic, but enjoyable. Your squad of up to ten Mii buddies give you a certain number of steps. You then progress across a map, shooting dangerous animals with tranquilizer darts, taking photos of wildlife, clearing overgrown bushes, and searching for treasure. The paths will split from time to time, so you must choose which way to go. The session ends when you run out of steps. The wildlife photos are quite pretty, and you can look at them in a gallery.
And that’s it. Streetpass has grown to encompass a collection of mini games that spans genres. Some are more fun than others. But none of them are worth your time unless you can get those Streetpass hits. Fortunately, Nintendo have created Zones where you can get hits from people who were there previously. Unfortunately, these are only in the United States. So, a guy like me just buys a Raspberry Pi and a Wi-Fi dongle and does a little bit of harmless MAC address spoofing, and then I can have as many Streetpass hits as I want, when I want, thus making this thing actually playable.
If Nintendo were to frown on me for this, I would justify it by telling them that if I didn’t do this, I certainly wouldn’t have paid for the additional games, so this has benefitted them financially. I’m not the only one, either. If not for people using “Raspi Pass” all over the world, the world map function would likely be useless, unless you’re the type of person to go backpacking across Europe with your 3DS on the entire time (and given the battery life, that seems unlikely).
Despite their simplicity, I find most of these games to be quite addictive. Except Slot Racing. Slot Racing can go to hell.
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Community review by jerec (February 16, 2017)
On very rare occasions, Jerec finds a game that inspires him to write stuff about. The rest of the time he just hangs around being sarcastic. |
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