Nintendo Badge Arcade (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Ever wanted to decorate the home screen on the 3DS? Ever wanted to play crane games on the go without having to visit a real life arcade hall? Then Nintendo Badge Arcade might have been the title to satisfy those desires. Might have.

Nintendo has for a while experimented with different F2P and DLC models with varied grades of success, but all of its former attempts have felt priced correctly and have always had the core philosophy of not leaving the player feeling like they came out with the short end of the stick. The wonderful F2P titles Pokémon Rumble World and Pokémon Shuffle both showed wonderful ways of making free to play titles. All of that is, however, discarded in Nintendo Badge Arcade.

Badge Arcade is simply a crane game in which players hunt prizes in the form of badges that can be used to decorate their home screens. It sounds really fun, and it might have been. However, there is a catch, like there always is with crane games: it costs real money to play, mostly (but more on that later). Doesn't sound too bad? It is just a way to emulate the spirit of crane games as a game of risk and reward for the skill in question. How bad could it be? Really, really bad, actually.

Five plays for one Euro. That's how bad it is. Two minutes, tops, of entertainment and between 0-5 badges (depending on "skill") for one Euro. While the rate, at first, seems to be better than at a live crane game, it simply is not. In real life crane games, the money paid is meant to go both for the profit of the crane game owner, but also to supply prizes. While it's true that nothing can be made for free (which the rabbit that "owns" the crane game puts plenty of emphasis on), it can certainly not be 20 cents per copy expensive to make digital badges to decorate the 3DS home menu with, meaning that no matter how good the player is, they can never "win" here. The house is, in other words, always the winner!

While the prizes are bad, great gameplay maybe could justify the steep price per play, because when playing a game, the player is most often paying for the experience. However, this is simply not the case. Even in this department, Badge Arcade falls extremely short on the real deal. People could be forgiven for thinking that its digital format might give it the possibility to gain an edge upon the real thing, but here Nintendo has shown the utmost laziness in the design. It is a simplistic and extremely poorly designed crane game that is offered. Most stages require pressing the A button to make the crane start moving, and then by releasing the button it stops moving in the 2D field of badges. This removes a lot of the depth and precision demanded in the real deal and, therefore, a lot of what makes crane games enjoyable.

There is one redeemable quality with Nintendo Badge Arcade, though, that gives it a tiny edge over the real thing: free games. These are, however, unacceptably limited. There are five free games per day on a practice machine (in other words, none of the badges are added to the collection), with the chance of some dummy badges offering free games on the real machine. The purpose of this is, as stated by the bunny, to practice for gaming for real money. However, supposedly being for training, five games per day is an extremely sparse offering, and while playing these, the bunny keeps on nagging for people to pay for the real machine…

Never before has a cheap cash grab been as transparent as it is with Nintendo Badge Arcade. It could easily be seen as a basic course of economics: nothing is free. Not even the free games are free, since during those the bunny keeps advertising the paid version until (hopefully) the players give in. The biggest problem with having it like this is that it is mainly aimed towards kids both in prizes and aesthetics, leaving an extremely bitter afterthought: how many children have actually paid real cash on their parents' credit cards to go on? While the bunny is (thank goodness) extremely clear and points out in a very pedagogical way that the money used in-game is, in fact, real money, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that the bunny's repeated pleas for the player to just give in and try the paid machine have seeped through to several children (and maybe even older gambling addicts), making them buy these overpriced sad excuses for arcade games.