Ah, Swapnote.
As some of you may remember, we early Nintendo 3DS owners endured a very dark and desolate age. An age where we were taunted by this new-age hocus-pocus of having an always/mostly-online Nintendo system with a legitimate friends list. A friends list that could hold up to 100 dudes! A friends list where you could see what your friends were actually doing!
...But with no way to actually do anything with them. No messaging system, no Miiverse, not even games.
...Okay, true, there were a few online games at launch like Capcom's ramshackle shit port of the latest Street Fighter, but the first online game anyone actually cared about was Mario Kart 7 and that came out a year and a half after the system itself! And I think I speak for most of us when I say Mario Kart isn't worth playing except in dire circumstances (like when you're on the toilet or the deathbed), and by "most of us" I mean "all of us except fellow KoopaTV guest-employee YoshiRider123" who plays it every night for some reason. He plays it so often that my game thinks his name is Karla and that he's my girlfriend. Weird.
Anyway, the point is that for many, many months the 3DS offered no way for you to interact with your various friends on a regular basis. That is, until, Swapnote.
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Swapnote in its innocent, humble beginnings. |
As voluminously seen (and heard) above, you could also attach pictures and sounds to your notes, allowing you to basically record elements of your day-to-day life and broadcast them to your friends. (This is how I kept everyone updated on the "Streetpass Rapist" roaming the halls of Auburn University (and my attempts to catch him red-handed by genderbending my Mii), among other juicy stories.) However, when you give players the option to share pictures and sounds, you're giving them the option to share pictures and sounds of, well, anything. Including stereoscopic 3D penises and whatever noises they make.
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Nintendo's anti-penis measure: include them on the stationery itself! |
This article won the 2013 Most Humorous KoopaTV Article award!
What if Swapnote was shut down because it could be used for terrorists to communicate?
Nintendo has officially replaced Swapnote with... Swapdoodle, also featuring Nikki. But is it good enough?
Just to clarify, YoshiRider is a member of KoopaTV's staff.
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