Eleventh Hour Scramble
Posted March 10, 2024I had great fun with this blog back when I wrote most of the posts in 2017/18. And now, 6 years later (wow), I’m back because I’ve been playing some Pokémon games recently and discovered a couple of very small things that I didn’t see recorded online. So I thought it’d be fun to talk about some of those, so they’re recorded for posterity. (Or at least as long as I pay my domain registrar, and maybe the Internet Archive will keep it going from there.)
Winding it back a second - why am I back now? Why is this the “Eleventh Hour”?
On April 8th 2024, the 3DS online services are scheduled to be shut down. Nintendo have said that Pokémon Bank and Poké Transporter are going to continue to work, while all other online services for that console are going to stop.
They’re very specific about that (this screenshot is from the site at the above link):
A much more humorous earlier version of this site presented it as a list with Bank as the only item
Pokémon Home is the clear replacement successor to Bank. There is no scheduled end date for Pokémon Bank (at time of writing, 10th March 2024). So maybe it will continue quasi-indefinitely. I suspect it’s a cheap service to run physical cost wise. It’ll probably be about maintenance and security breaches, but I’m not here to conjecture about the cause. I’m here to conjecture about the timing.
I suspect Bank won’t live quasi-indefinitely, with the rest of the 3DS online coming down around it and especially with Home already up and running. But then again, are they really going to make all of those challenges unobtainable?
Still, things like this give me pause:
“At their earliest convenience” eh?
It’s important to note that this isn’t the main official Pokémon or Nintendo Twitter. “Play! Pokémon” are the folks who organize the official online tournaments and the like. And on top of that, it’s not confirmation of any date or even an intent.
But it makes me feel a deadline. A sense of impending doom, when all of Pokémon’s past will be cut off from its future forever. (None of this should be a cloud service *grumble* *grumble* but we don’t get what I want!)
However! I do love a good deadline for getting things done.
So I’ve been back in Pokémon land, digging up old secrets and finding what nooks and crannies I left unexplored in the old games, before it’s too late.
I don’t know how many more blog posts I’ll get out of this run through, and it’ll be a little different from the “bizarre data sets” theme from before. But I hope if you enjoyed the old series, you’ll enjoy this one too.