I know the thread has run its course but it did get me contemplating the release lists/posts we had in the past. They had their positives and really high notes but I am not sure they were so much a net positive.
Things I liked
Knowing about new games, usually a few days before street date and in a position where I could actually play them and have some real info on them.
Mini reviews, either ones I did or ones others did. The went double when I was actually posting the releases, looking at trailers, overviews and whatever else as I was cobbling boxart and info together for the release.
Minor hacking work. Also cheat making. Neither was especially common in the release threads but it was good when it did crop up.
Translations for those games that needed it -- so many games made playable by explanations and basic menu translations.
The "screw it, I'll give it a go" thing we had going on throughout most of them. So much shovelware that really isn't was discovered that way, to say nothing of good humour during the rest of the time.
The "this game is no good but if the idea intrigues you then check out [this homebrew/this other game].
Things I did not care for
The endless "why won't it work and make me some toast while it is at it, oh I have not updated my flash cart/emulator since [3 years earlier] because I should not have to".
The not so constructive posts. "hurr durr, casual game" really does nothing when others might be giving it a spin for a laugh.
On the other hand the 3ds barely has any games, in terms of variety, quality and volume, and that does not look like it is going to change-- this is year 4 and
http://3ds.essh.co/ lists 1714 games,
http://www.advanscene.com/ lists 1210 plus 400 off eshop. Now
http://gbatemp.net/threads/5-years-of-ds-roms-in-5-days-year-5.237289/ (that is year 5 but year 4 was nearly that alone for the DS).
http://forums.no-intro.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2353 ,
http://forums.no-intro.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2443 and
http://forums.no-intro.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2471 would also indicate there is not a mass of undumped games out there.
Equally DS flash carts were good, GBA emulation was great and GBA flash carts were, relatively speaking, not that uncommon and well represented among the commenting peoples. 3ds flash carts are fiddly (simple enough once you know but there is a greater barrier to entry than cost), prone to not working with new releases or needing updates, not so common, emulators more at proof of concept level than usable and ROM hacking is something you have to sit there and actively pursue rather than just feed it to a batch file or run through basic cheat finding methods. I might ponder the size of 3ds games and relative ease of downloading one but I would have to think about that further -- internet speeds and hard drive space has improved but it is not really a matter of getting a file you can afford to ignore by going to your chosen ROM site that sticks them up on rapidshare.
To that end I doubt we will see what was good about them come back and there is no reason for the bad to stop.
