I lied. I'm not conscious of saving money anymore. I've probably spent $200 on the 3DS eShop before it went down today, and $70 of that in the past week. Been squirrelling away some more games to play now that I'm in the mood for new ones. Have a list:

• HarmoKnight
• Star Fox 64 3D
• Rhythm Heaven Megamix
• Kid Icarus: Uprising (this one necessitated a quick upgrade to a bigger SD card)
• Pokémon Picross (if you spent $30 in it, you get future Picrites for free, eShop being extent or not)
• Yoshi and Poochy's Woolly World (this one was in physical because it wasn't much cheaper on the eShop than it was on Amazon)

There was also supposed to be a copy of Ocarina of Time 3D in there, but that's getting shipped in April. That means I'll probably never get it, in my experience.

And on the Virtual Console side:

• Balloon Fight (NES)
• Mega Man 2 (NES)
• Pokémon Silver (GBC)
• Mario Bros. (NES)
• Pokémon Puzzle Challenge (GBC)
• Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons (GBC)

But Cammy! Why not just grab all this stuff off hShop for free??????

Oh my God, I've gotten so sick of getting asked this. Every time I've mentioned the eShop in some Discord server or on Blips, someone has brought up hShop. Look, buying stuff makes it more special. It's just true. I've downloaded tons of Wii WADs and ROMs and then just never actually played them. Easy come, easy go. Every game or album I buy, though, I feel obligated to really dig into it, and usually I get pretty damn close to it in the process. Plus, it's just cool to be able to say I used the eShop while it was still around.

I'm a fairweather fan of Nintendo; download or pirate if you like. But like, y'know, you're not cool for doing it. Everyone does it. I've done it. I've gotten stern warnings from my ISP for torrenting shit. (Yet I never bought that Harvey Danger album. Hm. Maybe that warning wasn't so effective after all.) It's not cool, it's not a way to show up the man, it's just a thing you can do. And I chose to buy a bunch of games instead.

I think I need to stop hanging out in places where 15-year-olds congregate, mostly.

So yeah, I'm gonna go back to playing Pokémon Puzzle Challenge now. Fun game! (Protip, if you have an XL, hold Start or Select at game boot. Like with DS carts, it will keep the original resolution of the game intact and not stretch it, and in the Virtual Console's case, you'll get a console-specific border around the game instead.) Excited to dig into it all, really. A lot of this is stuff I've never played, but have been thoroughly curious about.