Hands-On Impressions Of The Nintendo 3DS
Feature
We give you an inside look at the 3DS from Nintendo's exclusive pre-launch event held last weekend in Bristol. Is the 3DS all that it's cracked up to be? Does 3D give you headaches? Read on and find out.
Resident Evil The Mercenaries 3D showed itself to be action packed and I had loads of fun shooting at the hordes of enemies it threw at me. The game uses the touch screen to select inventory and this can be done really fast. The graphics were of good quality but I am quite sure Sony’s NGP will offer a step up from this for those who care about resolutions and pixels. Luckily I am more interested in gameplay and in this case it was offered in bundles and on par with playing Resident Evil on a console. It should be said that in this case, the 3D feature really does enhance the game. I actually jumped a bit when an enemy appeared in 3D in the foreground, just behind my character.
Super Street Fighter IV also makes good use of the touch screen as some of the more devastating combos are dealt by simply pressing a button on the touch screen. Don’t fret though; you can still perform the advanced moves through more traditional button combos if that is your preference. But for people like me, it was nice to have a Hadouken at a press of a button.
Augmented
My highlight of the day was another in-built feature of the 3DS that really did amaze me. It is called Augmented Reality and we were only allowed to play one of these so-called “AR Games”, but that was enough to simply astound me. This is the kind of innovation I was hoping to see from Nintendo. To set the experience, you place a card down on a well-lit surface, a table for example. Using the outward facing camera, the 3DS then detects the card and calibrates its distance from it. Once done the game starts. On the screen of the 3DS, you can see the card through the camera. All of a sudden you see a number of different targets placed around a structure pop out from the card. On-screen it looks as if this has just happened in front of you but in reality, the card is unchanged. The 3DS creates a virtual 3D image that adjusts its angle, size and position in accordance to where the 3DS is in relation to the card on the table. It is an effective illusion that makes you feel that the 3D image exists in reality. Your task in the game is to shoot the targets, but to see them all you will have to physically travel around the card to get the right angle. One target did catch me out by being inside the table that the card was sat on; only being visible from a top-down perspective. After shooting the targets, a dragon pops out from the card and proceeds to attack you.
Let me just tell you this: it is a promising sign that when that dragon popped out on the screen, I actually had to look beyond the device to check that the dragon was not actually sat on the table. That is how effective Augmented Reality is. I am not easily impressed but I must say I could not stop smiling whilst playing this game. I ended up playing it over again to relive this new experience that had me so inspired. I cannot even begin to imagine the possibilities of technology like this. For now this is a wonderful gimmick but it certainly points in the direction that I would like 3D gaming to go in.