See if the hardware lives up to the hype.
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: March 27, 2011
Score: 4.5 / 5
It’s been about six years since the release of the previous Nintendo handheld (or four, or two, or one, depending on who you ask), and now the 3DS has finally arrived. Nintendo has been touting its glasses-free 3D as some highly futuristic technology, and it’s put together an ad campaign on a grander scale than anything we’ve seen recently. The question is, does the hardware live up to the hype?
The 3DS unit itself is very similar to a DS, so wielding one should be familiar. Unlike the 3DS, the device has a shiny finish, especially on top, which is both good and bad; it looks very pretty, but it makes you hesitant to touch it since fingerprints get everywhere. The top hinge of the 3DS is ridged now, so you can get a bit of a grip on it when you try to open it, though I never really had this problem with my DSi. Almost everything is a slider now, and lights have been moved to various places on the device; light placement takes a bit of time to get used to, but the sliders are fairly welcome.
The buttons are placed a bit differently – the Power button is on the opposite side, and the Start and Select buttons are below the bottom screen, along with a Home button that takes you back to the main menu. The new Start placement is a bit annoying, as it’s harder to reach. The volume control has been returned to a slider, which is good for changing volume quickly, though it’s possible that your pocket can adjust the volume also.
As far as new additions go, the unit now has an analog slider pad, sort of like what the PSP has. I don’t own a PSP so I can’t really compare, but I’ve had no problems with this slider; characters control very smoothly and accurately, and I never end up losing my grip on it or anything of the sort. There’s a new switch on the right side of the unit, as well, for activating wireless communications, which is extremely welcome – going into Options anytime I wanted to trade Pokémon was a major pain.
The biggest addition, of course, is the 3D screen on top; how well does it work? Your mileage may vary depending on your eyes, according to reports, but I had little difficulty using the thing. The 3D is very impressive, and once you start using it regularly it’s difficult to go back to 2D; the sudden lack of depth is jarring and makes everything look rather boring by comparison. Though you do need to be in the “sweet spot” to see the 3D really well, and hold the 3DS in a certain place, I didn’t have as much difficulty with this most of the time, though if I got really into a game I could find myself leaning too far forward and ruining the effect. Of course, the 3D implementation is going to vary from game to game, so it generally depends on what you play with it.
You can really see the effect of the 3D when you utilize the last new hardware feature on the device, the 3D camera on the outside. If you want to show the 3D effect off, pop open the Nintendo 3DS Camera utility and use it to look around you, with the 3D slider all the way off, then all the way on. The difference is very noticeable and impressive. You can take up to 3,000 pictures with the camera, and you can also do things like use the timer, adjust depth, or merge faces together. In addition to the Camera, the Nintendo 3DS Sound option is also there, brought over from the DSi; most of its functionality is the same as before (record sounds, edit them, layer them, save them, etc.) but you have the option to receive and share sound clips through StreetPass.
If you’ve played around with the Mii Channel on the Nintendo Wii before, you know most of what to expect out of the Mii Maker. You create small avatars of yourself called Miis, adjusting their facial features, hair, size, favorite color and more. What the 3DS brings to the table is the ability to automatically build a Mii out of your picture; take a photo of yourself with the internal 3DS camera, and it will build a Mii that looks like you. When a friend and I tried it out, however, the device wasn’t as accurate as we had hoped; a couple of times it thought that we were squinting and other such things. If you build a Mii automatically like this, it might still need some adjusting before it’s to your liking.
Another Mii application is the StreetPass Mii Plaza, which uses the StreetPass feature to collect Miis and use them in a couple of different games. One of these games, Puzzle Swap, will have you looking for puzzle pieces in order to complete a 3D picture, and you gain these by interacting with others. The other game, Find Mii, is an RPG-like quest, where you recruit other Miis from StreetPass in order to battle enemies and rescue the king of… someplace. Characters are all recruited from StreetPass, but they won’t always last long; usually they’re good for a few attacks and then they head off.
Fortunately you can play this game even if you don’t know anyone else with a 3DS, which might be common for a little while to come; you can spend coins to get heroes, which are obtained by walking around with the 3DS in Sleep Mode. You can get up to ten coins per day by taking a thousand steps, which really is a lot less than you think. It’s maybe twenty minutes worth of walking around, so you shouldn’t be wanting for coins. They have other applications as well, like buying more features for your AR games.
One of the highly-touted pack-ins for the 3DS are the included AR Games, which can be pretty entertaining for short periods of time. The unit comes with six AR cards, but most of the time you’ll only be using the ? Block card. Place it on a flat surface and aim the camera at it, and said surface will be transformed into a game area. There are three actual games: Archery, AR Shot (which is generally miniature golf) or Fishing. All of these have will transform the landscape of your desk/bed/floor into various locales, curving the surface up or down, adding things like trees, and more; you’ll have to navigate this transformed terrain to get your ball in the hole, or shoot the target, or catch a sufficiently large fish. These are all fun to play, but I wish that there were more courses besides the few short, pre-set ones that currently exist. You can buy more with coins, though, and try and get a high score on each.
In addition to the actual games, there are some other manipulating tools that come with the AR Games. You can take pictures of the landscape with Miis inserted into the action, or you can use some of the other five AR Cards to insert various Nintendo characters into your picture. You can also draw a 3D graffiti on the landscape, which is a little bit weird to get used to. Later on, you’ll unlock the ability to buy “3D Tools”, which let you raise and lower the landscape on your own, as if you were drawing a 3D picture (which you are). I’m not sure about the lasting value of some of these, though they are a good display for the AR features of the 3DS. The fact that you have to unlock some of them adds decent replay value, too.
What drove me crazy with this, however, is that the AR function was always off-center and a bit diagonal to boot whenever I used it. Everything was always tilted counterclockwise slightly, and it makes me want to tilt my head at an odd angle whenever I play, but that doesn’t help matters much at all. I don’t know if this is my fault for initially holding it at an odd angle, but it is a bit of a pain.
The final new pack-in is another sort of AR game called Face Raiders. Using the camera, you take a picture of your face (or, if you’re me, you put glasses on your sock and take a picture of that) and it transforms your face into a flying helmet enemy that laughs at you. You’re then thrust into a shooter game where these enemies swarm all around you, and in order to shoot at all of them you have to turn yourself round and round while aiming your 3DS; this is not really a game to be played in a public place. It is quite engaging, though, and later on it can get legitimately difficult, with enemies spitting out other enemies and such. Of all the packed-in software on the 3DS, I think this might be my favorite, and it certainly gets the attention of people who want to try the 3DS out.
Other available features include an Activity Log, which shows you what you’ve been playing, how long, and a few other things, including a detailed log of what you’re playing every single day and how far you’re walking. Download Play makes a return, where you can pick up on other games being transmitted for some multiplayer fun. The System Settings are apparently still their own “software”, requiring time to load and needing to be exited, which is a little annoying. You do have a sort of helper bot that can guide you through certain features like setting up a wireless connection.
As stated before, the quality of the system, and even the quality of the 3D effect, is wholly dependent on the games that you intend to play on it. I can make one comment that is a direct reflection of the system itself, though: the thing is slow. When you’re booting the device up, or transitioning from one piece of software to another, the device has to take several seconds to load, longer than I would expect a cartridge-based handheld to take. It’s not unbearably slow, but it’s quite annoying whenever you have to wait for about ten seconds round trip just to change a system setting and go back.
Overall, the 3DS and the included software constitute a rather robust and well-designed package, inasmuch as the package can be judged while ignoring its software library. Many of the better games won’t be coming out until later, but there are a few good titles out now, and even the packed-in stuff will give you a bit of content to tide you over until the best games are released. More casual players will likely get a lot of enjoyment out of the included interactive titles, while the more intense games can rest assured that a solid piece of hardware, with an effective and non-gimmicky 3D screen, will be powering their Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time when the time comes. Who knows if there’s a redesign on the horizon somewhere, and how far off it is, but this first package is a solid piece of equipment. I just wish I knew what happened to the cool purple one from E3 2010.
