Ah, the Nintendo 3DS — the magical little clamshell that dared to say, “What if your eyeballs could do squats?” Released in 2011, this handheld wonder came with glasses-free 3D, which was either a mind-blowing leap into the future or a fast track to a mild headache, depending on how steady your hands and how forgiving your optic nerves were. You’d slide that 3D depth slider up just to say you did, marvel at Mario’s floating mustache for ten seconds, then immediately slide it back down and never touch it again. But the real charm wasn’t in the gimmicks — it was in the games, which were so good they made you forget the bottom screen was mostly used to poke at maps like a high-tech pirate.
The 3DS had everything: a weirdly effective StreetPass system that turned walking through malls into RPG side quests, a camera that took grainy 3D selfies (so you could finally see yourself disappointed in depth), and a library bursting with hits — Fire Emblem: Awakening, Pokémon X/Y, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, and enough Monster Hunter to destroy your thumb joints before age 30. The thing looked like a toy, sounded like a toy, but punched like a heavyweight champ in a hardware match. It even had backward compatibility with DS games, because Nintendo is the kind of friend who lets you borrow all their old stuff without even asking. The 3DS wasn’t just a handheld console — it was a pocket-sized party, a nostalgia grenade, and an eye-melting miracle all at once.
