Monday 7 February 2011

Nintendo 3DS and I saw It!

That’s right I saw a Nintendo 3DS first hand last weekend at a promo event at the Cube Gallery in Manchester. The event featured real life Street Fighter and Resident Evil stunts plus footage of games at launch and in development.

You can check out these snippets in super low quality video camera footage (sorry) on our YouTube page.

Real Life Street Fighter:
Managed to get the best bit of this brilliant, ridiculous fight.

Real Life Resident Evil:
Shot in 'Cloverfield' stlye.


Nintendo 3DS Game Line-up:
Sorry it cuts off short, my phone ran out of memory :(.

From the line-up of games on release the majority are the typical Nintendo brand and re-made games currently out. Now this isn’t a bad thing because it’s safer to sell games people know and love, see what the reactions are then bring in all the original titles later down the line. The only original title there that Zuby saw was Kid Icarus and although I didn’t play the game, he told me that it was brilliant.

I was on Street Fighter 4 3D, which was very cool. Simplified gameplay for casual users yet still challenging enough like the console version. New camera perspective was interesting and working very well with the 3D effect. My only main criticism from a console to handheld perspective of the game was that I couldn’t perform any special attacks from the known button combinations. Instead I had to resort to the buttons on the touch screen, which when pressed would carry out the move. I don’t know if this was my lack of skill or if it was just designed that way, but in any case it’s definitely a game you should get for a launch title ;).

There was also Resident Evil Mercenaries which simply put was the actual ‘Mercenaries’ mode you got from the Resident Evil 4 game. For originality it’s a no, but that didn’t stop the game looking mighty impressive in 3D and the controls were surprisingly good. There were few instances where the camera decided to play stupid, but overall another good game.

After that I got on to Ridge Racer and Pilot Wings, which there was a slight problem. For me when I got to these games, the 3D effect on the avatar being in the middle caused me to go cross-eyed and distracting me from the game. Adjusting the slider down a bit did help, but the 3D effect became minimal and otherwise pointless, so I turned it off. Now this was just me so whether or not this happens with other people I don’t know, but for me it made the whole 3D effect redundant. Still the game’s were simple and typically designed for a drifting and flying game and were otherwise o.k. to play.

Now there were only 30min sessions with the console so for the last 10mins I checked out the other 3DS capabilities. The camera included simple mini games where after you took the picture of someone’s face, they became the enemy in a simple point-and-shoot game. This was a revival of the classic Gameboy Camera which if anyone owned probably knows how much of a laugh you can get from it. The Augmented reality was o.k. (I guess), but I’ve seen loads of augmented reality before, so this to me was another version of the technology. However this seemed to be applied in a more accessible manner so perhaps future games could apply this as a standard mechanic, who knows. Other cool demonstrations included live TV broadcasting in 3D and 3D films, which they didn’t show, but included big names such as Disney and Dreamworks.

All in all the Nintendo 3DS has been better than my first expectations, however I personally don’t think I’ll rush out and get one just yet. If more original titles come out or a price drop is on the horizon, then that might tempt me to get one.

If you have a different view of the Nintendo 3DS then be sure to post a comment :).

Posted by Tim.

No comments:

Post a Comment