Depth perception and I have never been on the best of terms. I can't parallel park to save my life, baseball was always an exercise in blind luck, and to this day, I have yet to see the stupid sailboat in those magic eye paintings. Despite my considerable z-axis shortcomings, I was still pretty excited to try out the new Nintendo 3DS. Regardless of the actual effect, it's still a new Nintendo handheld and that's more than enough for me to rush home today to scoop the package off my doorstep. Unfortunately, I had convinced myself the system was coming out about 2 days later than it actually did, so I neglected to get around to ordering one of those nifty game cartridge things to play in it, so for now, we're just going to take a look at the system itself.
First of all, the thing is about what you'd expect from something with the DS title. It's just a little bit larger than the DSLite, but not as much as you may have heard. It took me a few good stare downs to see the difference, but then again, I'm not a very good judge of distance. The system sports the same clamshell style we've seen since the GBA SP and opens to a nice, widescreen display. Buttons have a nice springy click to them all around, including the shoulder buttons which have always been a bit spongy. The new analog nub feels terrific, though I currently don't have any games to verify this against.
The UI has a nice modern feel, though I find it oddly reliant on the Home button despite having used Apple's iOS for several years now. The system comes with a few games to test out, both of which rely on a terribly low resolution camera for some simple, alternate reality fun. Face Raiders has you taking blurry pictures of your friends to shoot in floating heads that smash through the video for you to swing around and shoot for some mindless, unsettling fun. The other AR Game, succinctly titled AR Games, has you put a card on the table that turns into a box of targets to shoot. I actually found this to be pretty fantastic and would have played it for hours had it not turned out to be a single 60 sec level. In both cases though, I'll be happy to ditch the grainy, Sega CD style background of my home for some nice, colorful polygons.
Now that I've wasted a good amount of time talking about all the things no one cares about, lets get to what actually matters. The 3D effect is nice, and while I don't suspect I notice it as well as others I can tell the difference between when its on and when its off. There's clearly an optimal range of where you can really see it that will take a little practice to adjust to naturally. Luckily, being a handheld it's rather easy adjust the screen to the proper angle. It seems though, that the Dual Screen nature of the DS actually hinders this somewhat, as peaking down at the lower screen regularly will throw you off. Overall though, it seems to work and will ultimately be up to the games to determine if its a solid innovation or a gimmick, and whether or not the 3D slider is toggled on or off.
For now though, I'm ready to leave it on and give this whole third dimension a try. In the worst case scenario, it's another solid, Nintendo portable device capable of sporting some notably improved visuals over its predecessor. The potential is there, just waiting for developers to unlock it. Hopefully, like the DS before it, they can once again far surpass our expectations.
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