Leading up to the surprise 3DS price cut over the summer, Nintendo announced that all early adopters who purchased a system and signed on to the eShop by the end of August 11th would receive 20 free Virtual Console games. 10 are NES games, and those ones became available as of September. The next 10 are GameBoy Advance games. These 10 GBA games, to be specific:
– F-Zero Maximum Velocity
– Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario Advance 3
– The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap
– Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
– Kirby & The Amazing Mirror
– Mario Kart: Super Circuit
– Mario vs. Donkey Kong
– WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$
– Metroid Fusion
– Wario Land 4
Those are 10 of the finest GBA games money can buy, and right now, Nintendo 3DS Ambassadors, they’re yours to download free of charge. (The GBA Ambassador update took place in Japan earlier in the week, but now the games are also available in U.S., Canada, Mexico and Brazil)
To get at them, do the same as you did with the NES games: Pay a visit to the eShop, tap open the “Menu” tab in the upper-left corner, hit the “Settings / Other” option, and then under “History” select “Your Downloads” and scroll through the list to find them available for redownload.
Remember last week when Nintendo released a system update? Part of that patch added a new Download Later feature in the eShop. These free games gave me the perfect opportunity to test out the new feature and it proved to be incredibly handy. I quickly dropped each game into the Download Later queue and exited back to the 3DS home menu. From there I could see the gift-wrapped downloads in pending status. Then when I closed the system and left it in sleep mode the downloads commenced. Within 10 minutes I opened the system back up and they were all downloaded and ready to be unwrapped. Couldn’t have been easier!
Matt Litten is the full-time editor and owner of VGBlogger.com. He is responsible for maintaining the day to day operation of the site, editing all staff content before it is published, and contributing regular news, reviews, previews and other articles.
Matt landed his first gig in the video game review business writing for the now-defunct website BonusStage.com. After the sad and untimely close of BonusStage, the former staff went on to found VGBlogger.com. After a short stint as US Site Manager for AceGamez, Matt assumed full ownership over VGBlogger, and to this day he is dedicated to making it one of the top video game blogs in all the blogosphere.
Matt is a fair-minded reviewer and lover of games of all platforms and types, big or small, hyped or niche, big-budget or indie. But that doesn't mean he will let poor games slide without a good thrashing when necessary! 
