Today's the first day of the rest of my life; today's the day I finally start playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Jeff argues it's better than The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and since I haven't played Zelda II yet, I can't really argue against that point.

Soon, that's going to all change.

Nintendo made everything live for the NES part of the 3DS Ambassador program today, making 10 old school games, some of 'em genuine classics, available for free. Another set of Game Boy Advance games will arrive later on this year.

Naturally, downloading them is a huge pain. Don't believe me? Here's a step-by-step process, taken from my own 3DS.

The typical "Restore Point" save functionality, allowing you to save/load at any time, are not in these versions of the games, but will come later. Instead, you're limited to the stopgap "VC Suspend."

But, hey, at least I have something to do with my 3DS.

Today's the first day of the rest of my life; today's the day I finally start playing Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Jeff argues it's better than The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and since I haven't played Zelda II yet, I can't really argue against that point.

Soon, that's going to all change.

Nintendo made everything live for the NES part of the 3DS Ambassador program today, making 10 old school games, some of 'em genuine classics, available for free. Another set of Game Boy Advance games will arrive later on this year.

Naturally, downloading them is a huge pain. Don't believe me? Here's a step-by-step process, taken from my own 3DS.

The typical "Restore Point" save functionality, allowing you to save/load at any time, are not in these versions of the games, but will come later. Instead, you're limited to the stopgap "VC Suspend."

But, hey, at least I have something to do with my 3DS.

So wait, how does saving work?

Huzzah!

dude

Wow stupid process. I went to the eShop to see if it was available yet and didn't see anything so I shut off my 3DS until I saw this post. Thanks Patrick.

Atleast they released them a day early. Didn't they say september 1st?

                   

So wait, how does saving work?

                   

               

Damn, I knew I would have to download these one at a time.

@ds8k: yea u cant save any you have to play zelda in 1 sitting and with 3 hours or battery life lol hope the updates come soon

EDIT

ok so yo can save but only once i guess its better then nothing cant complain i guess they were free thanks for the help guys

Always with the back-asswards online functionality, Nintendo.

rabbit hole typo

@drowsap: Zelda should be fine because the actual NES game had save functionality right?

Not available in the UK yet. :(

@drowsap said:

@ds8k: yea u cant save any you have to play zelda in 1 sitting and with 3 hours or battery life lol hope the updates come soon

Oh wow, that's terrible. My GCN version of Zelda 1 even lets me save.

Nintendo + Online = Fail, again.

Wait you can't save at all? Not even a save state?

I'm beginning to think Nintendo might actually have a real Internet allergy.

Atleast they released them a day early. Didn't they say september 1st?

@RecSpec:

that was my thought to but i havent found a way to save no option on the pause screen and i dought it auto saves lol havent played it in 15 years

@Chavtheworld said:

@dogman795 said:

Atleast they released them a day early. Didn't they say september 1st?

Yeah, I'm not surprised this method is really hard as they don't release these till tomorrow Patrick! I bet if you go on tomorrow there might be a more obvious link to them.

Nope.

http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/3ds/en_na/3dsambassador.jsp

Also you can switch controllers (for example: to save anytime in Zelda) If you hold the L&R buttons, you can press Y to switch to the second controller.

@RE_Player92: I'm going to lean towards saying no.

Oh, Nintendo! Kiss your hardware goodbye.

@RE_Player92 said:

Wait you can't save at all? Not even a save state?

@drowsap said:

@ds8k: yea u cant save any you have to play zelda in 1 sitting and with 3 hours or battery life lol hope the updates come soon

That's not quite right. The games act like the Wii VC where when you close out of it, it saves your game right at that point. The only thing that's missing is the ability to create restore points that you can load up at will.

An example: Play 30 minutes of Zelda. Close out of the game,l and it will save you at 30 minutes in. Go load up Ocarina of Time 3D. Once you got your fill of that, you can simply reopen Zelda OG and the game will start right where you left off.

You can even turn off your 3DS and the game will still resume where you quit out of it. So really the lack of a restore point feature isn't that huge of a deal unless you really suck at Mario.

A clumsy process, but the games themselves download very fast, and all take up like 30 to 35 blocks at most on the SD card. Plenty of gift boxes to unwrap now! 
 
I just wish we could rearrange the apps on our home screen so I can put all my Zeldas together.

I'm surprised you've never played Zelda II, Patrick. It's the creepiest of the Zelda games.

@Chavtheworld said:

@dogman795 said:

Atleast they released them a day early. Didn't they say september 1st?

Yeah, I'm not surprised this method is really hard as they don't release these till tomorrow Patrick! I bet if you go on tomorrow there might be a more obvious link to them.

Nope.

http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/systems/3ds/en_na/3dsambassador.jsp

@Wi@Witzig said:

@ds8k said:

So wait, how does saving work?

I assume that you can't save which is a total bummer but as Patrick said "free games"

Wait a minute. None of these games had in-game save functionality? Then they really should have waited until they had the save thing sorted out before they released these.

You can't "save" your games, but the suspend feature means it's not really a huge deal. Just don't tap "reset"!

@wolf_blitzer85 said:

@drowsap said:

@ds8k: yea u cant save any you have to play zelda in 1 sitting and with 3 hours or battery life lol hope the updates come soon

That's not quite right. The games act like the Wii VC where when you close out of it, it saves your game right at that point. The only thing that's missing is the ability to create restore points that you can load up at will.

An example: Play 30 minutes of Zelda. Close out of the game,l and it will save you at 30 minutes in. Go load up Ocarina of Time 3D. Once you got your fill of that, you can simply reopen Zelda OG and the game will start right where you left off.

You can even turn off your 3DS and the game will still resume where you quit out of it. So really the lack of a restore point feature isn't that huge of a deal unless you really suck at Mario.

I can confirm this. Which is great, because I thought that these versions were not going to have that. Restore points are nice, but as far as save functionality goes. This is just fine.

This is really no different than downloading delisted XBL content.

Nothing in Norway yet :(

A clumsy process, but the games themselves download very fast, and all take up like 30 to 35 blocks at most on the SD card. Plenty of gift boxes to unwrap now!  I just wish we could rearrange the apps on our home screen so I can put all my Zeldas together.

This is nintendo saying "fuck you" to those who bought a 3DS after they announced the ambassador program.

@dogman795 said:

Atleast they released them a day early. Didn't they say september 1st?

My thoughts exactly! Maybe the files got released early, but the menu options will hit tomorrow?

It appears that the European store hasn't got them yet. The store took like 2 minutes to load for me though.

It's even clumsier for me. My 3DS doesn't play nice with my WiFi firewall and the router's been patched so that I can't disable it, so it's really hard to get my 3DS to download anything without going to someone else's house. I have to keep disconnecting my 3DS from my hotspot and then re-inputting the info so as to somehow kickstart it, which only works for one or two games until I have to do it all over again. 
 
But yeah, I guess it's still free video games.

Didn't they say that these were the working early releases of these games and that they would be publishing updates in the future? I hope so, because not having a same for some of these games is ridiculous.

@Chavtheworld: The official website has been listed these as the instructions to get the games for a few days. Seems like it's going to be the only way.

Oh, and we're still waiting in Europe.

Funny...before they announced that it was part of the ambassador program I started playing through Zelda II on my computer using Nestopia (what? I already have bought the game like five times...) and I'm at the last dungeon now. I can respect it, even if it's really crusty and I don't love it.
 
@patrickklepek: You will definitely want to use this, unless you like screaming at your 3DS. http://www.zeldadungeon.net/Zelda02-the-adventure-of-link.phpVery, very useful.

What a tedious pain, oh well free

Nothing here in Europe yet.

@SSully said:

This is nintendo saying "fuck you" to those who bought a 3DS after they announced the ambassador program.

ummm, no, it isn't. Nintendo just sucks at the internet.

@49th said:

It appears that the European store hasn't got them yet. The store took like 2 minutes to load for me though.

well, we didn't even get a tool or a website to check our ambassador status ...so it's all going to be a surprise once the first europeans confirm they're available and your eShop doesn't display them although you should be an ambassador ...

I'm just waiting for this to get annoyingly complicated ...

Downloading them isn't as bad as people are making it out to be.

Man, what a huge pain! It took me two extra taps to download! How unbelievably ridiculous this whole thing is!

I don't considering having to click three times, or whatever, all that annoying. Sure it's not in obviously places, but are you really that lazy?

@dillinger: You have to do it 10 times though because it reboots you back to main screen. And the eShop keeps crashing because Nintendo apparently wasn't anticipating this...

@dillinger said:

I don't considering having to click three times, or whatever, all that annoying. Sure it's not in obviously places, but are you really that lazy?

Except you have to do it 30 times to get all the games.