Happy 3DS Day folks! Another hardware launch is upon us and I, for one, have been looking forward to this one. The Nintendo 3DS, the successor to Nintendo's 6 year and still running handheld, has launched today with a screen that is not only in 3D, but does so without the use of 3D glasses. I preordered my 3DS in aqua blue at the local Gamestop a couple of months ago and arrived at 9 a.m. this morning to pick it up. To my surprise, the place was dead. No lines, no camping, no one coming to pick their 3DS up, nothing. As far as gaming hardware launches go, the 3DS launch has been a wasteland and unexciting. I didn't even see a news report about it.
Anyhow, lets get to the nitty gritty here. I grabbed a launch 3DS this morning with a copy of Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition. Street Fighter seemed to be the only launch title really worth buying, as the other 15 launch titles were not worth the cash, disappointing, or not an interest to me. I purchased the 3DS for the sole reason that my all-time favorite game, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, is being remade for it and releasing in a couple of months. While I wait for my beloved Ocarina of Time to arrive, I plan on playing a lot of Street Fighter online and attmepting to hunt down Miis in StreetPass. Here are my first impressions of the 3DS:
The handheld itself looks great, feels good, controls well, all of that jazz. My only qualm is with the d-pad, which is kinda uncomfortable to use down at the bottom. The thumb stick feels great and feels much better than the crappy analog nub on the PSP. I've been busting out Street Fighter moves with that thumb pad all day with no problems at all. The face buttons have a nice clicky feedback to them, which I like.
The built-in software is pretty impressive. AR Games really wowed me when I started playing it. I did originally have some issues getting the cards to read properly (you have to be in a well-lit room and at a good distance in order to get them to read) but once I booted up some games I was impressed. Fighting the dragon on my kitchen table was pretty awesome as it snapped at my face in 3D, which is probably the most impressive use of the 3D I've seen so far.
Face Raiders is surprisingly fun too, which will have you snapping goofy photos and shooting balls into your mouth (teehee) while spinning around the room like an idiot. It is another piece of software that is great to break out on some people when showing the system off. I doubt I will spend a lot of time on the AR Games or Face Raiders, but its a cool little addition. I used the Mii AR card feature to snap a picture of my Mii in the palm of my hand, which was cool, but the photo software on the 3DS no longer allows you to upload to Facebook like the DSi did, which is a shame.
The Street Pass and Mii Plaza features are really cool to me. I actually want to put my system on sleep mode and walk around in public in hopes of catching other people's Miis and play mini-games with them. One of the mini-games is called Find Mii which is sort of a dungeon crawling RPG that uses your StreetPass aquired Miis to help save you from a dungeon; its pretty sweet. Whether or not I will be successful at finding other Miis around town is a different story (unless you are in Japan or New York), but it is kind of exciting to try to catch some and see what happens.
The 3D itself is much better than I experienced in the kiosk at Best Buy, mainly because I'm not standing in front of a 3 foot kiosk squatted down attempting to play. You do need the right position in order to fully experience the 3D, but with the way I generally hold the DS anyway, it always seems to be in the sweet spot for me so I never have any problems being off-centered. The only issue I had was with the AR games because I literally have to move and juke from side to side in order to rotate my view to find targets, and I would find myself holding the system at an angle that made the screen look blurry. While playing SSFIV though, I had no issues while mashing buttons. I tend to keep the slider in the center, which seems to be the sweet spot for me. I played the thing for a good hour or more and my eyes didn't hurt or anything.
As for the launch titles, I only bought SSFIV (which seems to be the best of the launch titles). The game seriously isn't a joke at all, this is full-fledged SSFIV packed with even more features than before. The only difference is that the backgrounds are rendered in-engine but they do not animate like in the console counterparts. The fighters looks near-identical to the console versions and the game controls silky smooth. The 3D is subtle, but it looks cool seeing the HUD features floating off of the screen, and pulling off ultra combos looks sweet in 3D. I have yet to try the 3D battle mode yet though.
It is nice being able to pull off some of the harder moves and the super/ulra combos by using the touch screen, but I can see how die hard fighting game fans like Anya will hate that. I did play a couple of matches online and I definitely had a better experience with the 3DS version than I did on the 360 version. The game connects quickly, it finds players quickly, and it ran with no hiccups at all. I'm sure some frames are being lost to lag, but I sure as hell couldn't tell if there were. My only gripe is that playing online will lead you to running into a crap ton of people who mash the touch screen and abuse it. I played against a Cammy player who mashed the same move every time and won, which really pissed me off.
Overall I'm really happy with my 3DS purchase. The hardware itself is nice and I'm excited to see how developers use the 3D in the future. As soon as Zelda hits and we get more killer apps, I'm sure more people will jump on-board.
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