A new update to the 3DS’ StreetPass Plaza will let you finally skip a lot of the chatter that slows down clearing out your StreetPass queue—but it’ll cost you. The update will also let you hide StreetPass games you no longer want to play. That one’s free.
If you were hoping that they’d up the 10-Mii-at-a-time StreetPass limit, I see no sign of that. I haven’t passed enough people yet to be sure, but I don’t think that’s happening.
But here’s what is happening, first in the free update....
1) You can take StreetPass games you’re not interested in and hide them. Later, Find Mii! Toss it in the Vault.
2) You can rearrange your StreetPass icons. I’m not too excited about this, but maybe you are?
3) You can customize the word balloons you use in your StreetPass greetings (the... ones people will no longer see if they turn off their chat options), changing this:
...to any of the balloons you’ve collected, such as:
Nintendo would love if you paid $5 to fully upgrade your StreetPass Plaza. I am not sure you need to do this, but if you pay, you can...
1) Greatly reduce time-consuming interactions with other Miis in the Plaza (You’ve got puzzle pieces to claim, right? No time to talk.)...
2) Collect people’s Birthdays.
3) Turn some Miis into VIPs so that they never get cleared from your system.
4) Listen to StreetPass Plaza music even when your system is closed.
Nintendo has also released some new games today, one called Battleground Z and one called Ultimate Angler. I haven’t tried them yet, but I did at least buy them ($6.99 in some sort of bundle tied to me owning all the other StreetPass games), so I got some new hats:
I’m a sucker for StreetPass games, so expect impressions in the coming days.
NOTE: The free update I’ve been describing won’t be applied automatically. You have to go into your StreetPass Mii Plaza, look for the leftmost icon that checks for software updates and then go through a few prompts. It won’t take long.
Correction - 7:10pm: An earlier version of this post stated that the “Skip Conversations” function was free—you actually need to pay for the upgrade to use it, even though it shows up in your Settings either way. The original headline read “Nintendo Just Made 3DS StreetPassing A Little Less Annoying.”
To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo.