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!