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Preview – Nintendo 3DS

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Over 6 months from when Gamecrawler were at E3 seeing the Nintendo 3DS in the flesh. Nintendo have finally answered one of two questions everyone was asking, “when?”. “How much?” was left to the retailers to answer.

But is it worth the wait, and more so the cost. Have Nintendo failed to react to the shifts in the mobile gaming market place, or are they showing us a new future?

Hardware

The 3D screen which is the top screen is .5” larger than the DS and comes in the widescreen 5:3 aspect with a better resolution. The 3D affect comes with a slider so that you can adjust to suite your eyes.

The touch screen is at the bottom and not much has changed on this front. The previous screen was resistive and Nintendo have stuck with this in the 3DS. This was a big design flaw in the previous DS especially when you saw the mess children made of it by pressing to hard. A toughed glass capacitive screen could be an improvement.

The device itself is smaller and lighter than the original DS but slightly thicker than the DSi.
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The 3DS has 3 cameras one facing you as you play the console and 2 on the outside. By using the 2 on the outside you can take 3D pictures. A great feature but until 3D photo frames or other 3D devices are more common place it has limited draw.

The metal stylus adds an adult feel to the package.

Content/social

This is a separate feature than games, which will be covered in another post.

Sky 3D and Eurosport have confirmed they will be providing content for the 3DS. No announcement has been made as to exactly what this will consist of. Aardman animation have confirmed a 1 minute Shaun the Sheep clip will be available.

The 3DS will download content through it’s Spotpass connection which will use partner and home wireless connections. Spotpass is a wireless connection which will allow you to download on the go (provided you are in range of a partnered hotspot, which in the UK is BT Fon).

Fears have already been raised about the ability to use this feature for spam, Nintendo will have to deal with this carefully. In addition, there is the Streetpass function that allows you to swap details with your friends wherever you are.

When it comes to playing with friends, Nintendo have massively simplified this compared to their previous attempts. You now have 1 friend code to share, using this you will be able to link with all your friends outside of specific games.

Round up

Overall the 3DS is a great piece of kit featuring plenty of improvements over their previous handhelds. The line up of launch games looks impressive and with most DS games being supported means you will already have a good library to play from the off.

However, 3D is very niche at the moment and I am not convinced there is enough reason to tempt me with 3D gaming yet, combined with little advise from the health industry about potential risks to eye sight, there are plenty concerns for this cute little console.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 12:09 pm and is filed under General Gaming, Nintendo DS, Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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