Last month, Nintendo announced a price drop for their latest handheld console, the 3DS - and as this drop was quite early on in the console's life, Nintendo decided to soften the blow to the people who bought it early by offering them twenty free games. Consider us appeased.If you bought your 3DS before the 12th August, you class as a 3DS Ambassador - and if you visited the eShop before then you'll be automatically registered (although don't worry if you didn't, as Nintendo are still letting you join if you email them a copy of your receipt showing the date you bought it). From tomorrow, the Ambassadors will get ten NES games, five of which have already been announced - and, as both Japan and America are getting them too, it's a pretty safe guess that the rest of the five will be as follows:
Wrecking Crew
Armed with a rather heavy hammer that means he can't jump, Mario needs to destroy all of the obstacles in a level, whilst avoiding the foreman Spike, who tries to sabotage Mario's work, amongst a host of other enemies. You'll need to think about the right order to destroy the objects though, as - for example - detonating the wrong bomb may destroy a ladder you need to get to another part of a level, giving you no choice but to restart. Blowing things up, with brains!
NES Open Tournament Golf
The multi-talented Mario tries his hand at golf, across three eighteen-hole courses, in an effort to be the best golfer and win a million dollars. The game offers three different modes - Stroke Play, where the player with the lowest total score across the whole course wins; Match Play, where you win on a hole by hole basis; and Tournament mode, where you compete with computer opponents over either eighteen or thirty six hole matches.
Yoshi
Known as Mario & Yoshi in Europe, you control Mario, who sits at the bottom of the screen as various monsters descend from the top. You need to swap the columns of monsters around to catch the falling baddies and make vertical matches of two or more, which makes them disappear. Sometimes, you'll get the top and bottom of a Yoshi egg, and any monsters that are trapped in a column between the base and the top of the egg disappear.
Metroid
The first iteration in the Metroid series follows bounty hunter Samus Aran as she explores the planet Zebes' caverns. Beginning with only a weak gun and the ability to jump, you'll find power-ups hidden around the place that give you special abilities and better armour and weapons, letting you go to places you couldn't before - like the Morph Ball power-up, which sees Samus curl up into a ball, letting her roll through tunnels.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
Noticing a strange mark on the back of his hand, Link learns that he's able to open a door, which has been magically sealed for generations. Behind the door lies Princess Zelda, and only Link is capable of awakening her by collecting all three parts of the Triforce. A departure from every other game in the Zelda series, Zelda II has you defeating enemies, gaining experience points to level up your health, attack power and magic spells, and is played from a side-on perspective. Weird, but cool.
Those of you who are good at maths might have noticed that five plus five makes ten - which means that you're ten games short of your promised twenty. The remaining ten games will be Game Boy Advance titles, which will release some time before the end of the year - although we only know five of those so far. Needless to say, we're expecting a full list to come out of the woodwork sometime in the coming months, so keep checking back!
