Monday 8 April will be a sad day for Nintendo fans. We should all gather together and pour one out, or press ‘F’ out of respect, as two consoles ride off into the sunset. Online services for both the 3DS and the WiiU will be shut down, ending an era and taking with it hundreds of games.
This move from Nintendo, which we have seen before with the Wii, will mean that players can no longer access online multiplayer services and, in some cases, games will vanish forever and be completely inaccessible.
Super Mario Maker lives on in its Switch sequel, so there are still millions of levels to play
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Both the WiiU and the 3DS held some great games that relied on either a multiplayer component - uploading levels to Super Mario Maker, for example - or had digital-only releases, like the superb Attack of the Friday Monsters. These features of the consoles will be gone forever after 8 April and fans are, understandably, gutted to see the service end.
If you want to grab one last game of Splatoon with your buds, then you need to make some time this weekend and enjoy it before it’s gone. The good news, which we will desperately salvage, is that many of the games for both systems don’t heavily rely on an online connection. Some of the best games will still run perfectly fine if you pick them up secondhand. If you’ve always been a solo player, the shutdown is unlikely to affect you. Together, we’ll remember those late nights in Splatoon lobbies, or finding great levels in Super Mario Maker. Both of these titles, it should be known, do live on with the Switch through their sequels like Splatoon 3 and offer vast numbers of hours of enjoyment. So, let’s all bow our heads and raise a glass for the WiiU and the 3DS, they were great Nintendo consoles that featured some cracking games.