Hey guys!

As you may all know, the Big N soon will shutdown all online services for the 3DS family and the Wii U. Surprising? Not much. But hurts nonetheless.

Though I personally don’t really use actively my 3DS (and I also sold out from it a long time ago, still have 2, somewhat functioning O3DSs *:waiting to be repaired), I couldn’t help but dust off my working* console and went online.

Apart from the nerdgasm I had (since, 7 is my absolute favorite Mario Kart in every possible way) I couldn’t help but notice how fucking awful the online was. Same 4-5 japanese dude, fully packed with cheats and hacks.

My heart was broken, but all that doesn’t matter. This is why I’m kinda OK with the shutdown, tho I don’t know about the other games. I mean, Mario Maker, Mario Kart 8, Splatoon, these all will be gone, and I’m sure lots of people have similar feelings towards their games like I do to MK7. So saying this could sound pretty harsh, but if this is the case with the other games as well - and the Wii U’s also a pretty open and used book for hacks nowadays - maybe… it’s really time. Honestly, it’s just WILD how online gaming on the 3DS (and probably on the Wii U as well) works from today’s standpoint.

But I just got off-tracks.

What I really wanted to talk about and just wanted to give a little bit of context for this, is Pretendo.

https://pretendo.network/

If you don’t know about Pretendo, it’s an open-source Nintendo Network implementation. Basically, you can create a PNID here on the normal way you would create an NNID on your machine, and all your 3DS online services are now routed to Pretendo. Currently, some games, but at least Mario Kart 7 online works, pretty much flawlessly (except Friend functions). But it’s real, it works, it’s amazing… just really empty.

You can find the list of the compatible games and their states.

It even has some kind of Miiverse alternative too up and running, called Juxtaposition.

Using a modded console, it’s just a matter of installing a title. https://pretendo.network/docs/install
You can change between Pretendo and Nintendo here.

Though use it at your own risk, as any homebrews that mess with the system in one or another way.

I’m maybe just too excited, but the online services will be killed off anyway, and I just love MK7 way too much, so I’m glad these people made it possible to run custom servers for it.

What do you guys think about it?