Download some more games for your Nintendo DSi before it’s too late

The casket slowly closes on another piece of digital gaming history.

If you have an old Nintendo DSi or DSi XL lying around, you might want to dig it out today for one final trip to the online store. That's because today marks your last chance to add funds to purchase downloadable games that will soon be lost down digital gaming's ever-expanding memory hole.
After 5pm PDT today, you will no longer be able to purchase the virtual "DSiWare points" currency used to download digital games on DSi systems. Points purchased today (or previously) can still be spent on new games until March 31, 2017; that will also be the last day to redownload games you've previously purchased.

Games already downloaded to a DSi will still work after that date, and you can even transfer those DSiWare purchases over to a newer 3DS to keep them consolidated on fresher hardware. The vast majority of the DSiWare library will also still be available through the DSiWare section of the Nintendo 3DS eShop, so this isn't exactly the end of the line for the hundreds of titles made for Nintendo's first portable digital storefront. (If you're looking for some good DSiWare download recommendations, NeoGAF has a robust crowdsourced list going.)

Still, there are a few DSiWare games that can't make the leap to the 3DS, including a quality port of The Oregon Trail. There are also plenty of purists out there who complain that games made for the DSi's 256×192 resolution look odd when upscaled to fit on the 3DS' less vibrant 400×240 screen (not to mention the black border letterboxing required thanks to the different aspect ratios and shapes).

Specifics aside, though, the impending shutdown of the DSiWare shop is worth noting as part of the continuing trend of digital game stores shutting down—and threatening to take chunks of gaming history with them. Last year, Sony shut down PlayStation Mobile, cutting off access to plenty of great Vita titles from smaller indie publishers. Xbox Live's Indie Games program will fully shut down in 2017, leaving quite a few hidden gems without an online home. And Apple has begun the process of culling "problematic and abandoned" older games from the App Store, continuing a process of game removal already started by many iOS game publishers themselves.

Unlike physical games, which can be more readily collected and archived for future generations, these digital store shutdowns create a huge problem for video game preservationists. Abandoned by the platform holders that once supported them, thousands of games are now left orphaned and trapped, only existing on the scattered pieces of hardware that happened to download them before the kill switch was flipped. And with no easy (or legal) way to copy those games to to another medium, it's only a matter of time before hardware failure starts slowly removing them from history altogether.
Yes, DSiWare titles will continue to live on through the 3DS (for now), and many successful titles on abandoned stores end up ported to newer, more robust platforms. Still, if we're not careful, we're going to look up one day and wonder why it's so hard to find a working copy of Geometry Wars or Braid that's playable on its original hardware.