Our video guy bought himself a Nintendo 3DS, and is intrigued enough to stop jump-cutting and focus-pulling to give us his first impressions...
Before I start my ramblings on Nintendo’s latest portable outing (geddit?) I’m going to express a thought I’ve had since the 3D craze first began: 3D has a time and a place and isn’t enjoyed by everyone.
Nintendo realised this after the Virtual Boy debacle and treated 3D like the leper it was. But then some dude who liked drowning actors in the 80s made 3D big again and everyone had a marketing-gasm and decided it needed to be in everything even if it was implemented poorly. So Nintendo went to the colony to take another look.
Now they've made 3D portable and optional, because giving people choices is what smart designers do.
Let me just insert here that I am not a Nintendo fanboy, I just think they’re good at what they do - which I’ve generally thought is attempting to world domination through the cunning use of a mascot who still can’t seem to get any from a girl he’s ‘saved’ countless times from a giant real estate mogul dinosaur/tortoise she’s clearly banging.
I digress.
The look of the black 3DS is glossy, unlike the matte black of the DSi, which I much prefer. You’ll see the two cameras on the top, which produce .3 megapixel 3D photos, which are fun and cool when taken at the right distance, but make you think of the potential of proper 3D photography more than anything.
The device looks and feels like a PSP when its closed and I think that detracts from the knowingly dorky factor Nintendo usually go for. Once you open it, though, the illusion is shattered and the Nintendo design prevails. The new things inside are the analogue control, Home button and 3D slider.
The Home menu is a portable version of the Wii home menu and features the same block-based system, which is simple and effective.
During gameplay you can hit the Home button and up comes the main DS menu while your games runs in the background. I have no idea what effect this has on battery life, but I’m sure its not good. Portable multitasking never is.
The in-game Home menu only works with 3DS titles, but it does mean no longer quitting games to change screen brightness.
Some of the software advantages of the 3DS over its predecessors won’t be seen until later in the year when Nintendo releases firmware updates that will install the web browser and Virtual Console store. And with Nintendo in talks with some big movie studios it’s likely we’ll also see a 3D movie store as well.
Some of the things that make the DSi work so well have changed on the 3DS, including the position of the stylus. The all-important pointing device has been relocated in order to cater for a new wifi switch.
The stylus’ new home is behind the screen to the side of the cartridge slot, which is a pain if you go from a using your fingers on the touch screen to needing the precision of the stylus.
That being said the new switch is a huge improvement over having to go into the settings menu to turn the battery-draining bastard off. It’s typical of a small device packing so much in.
The improvement in the hardware that lurks inside the 3DS means games have better graphics, physics, textures… generally they just look better. And they’re in 3D. The 3D slider works very well and goes from the extreme try-to-reach-your-hand-inside-the-screen effect down to the moderate is-it-in-3D-no-wait-no-yes-it-is effect then all the way down to the second dimension. That pathetic dimension in which you currently read this article.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012