Nintendo 3DS (plus some first impressions of games)

So the Nintendo 3DS has launched in Australia and I have been one of the people lucky enough to have played one. That's not to say I actually own one. But my brother got one launch day and I've done my fair share of dicking around with it. And dicking around is something the 3DS caters for quite nicely, with a whole bunch of pre-installed software that are actually quite reminiscent of the kind of things that Apple bundle with their Macbooks. There's some light-hearted sound sampling and photo taking apps as well as an actually quite fun game, the name of which currently eludes me, in which you can take photo's of people and turn them into enemies you can shoot. It's actually kind of fun and clevey in that it utilizes the camera's in the gameplay and manages to recreate your friends as 3D disembodied heads. Mind you it looks kinda crappy when the heads rip holes in the "real world" revealing void of some sorts. I'm sure it'd be impossible to explain what I mean to anyone who hadn't actually played this game so you'll just have to trust me, it looks like a messy arse.

Speaking of messy I've found it pretty hard to find a nice flat surface in my room to play the Augmented Reality games due to my desk being littered with uni work and miscellaneous crap. But I guess I can't really blame Nintendo for that. What I can blame them for is the tutorial, which failed attrociously to explain if and how I'm supposed to use the other character cards for the AR games. I probably need to explain this. You see the 3DS comes with a small collection of cards (like trading cards) with the idea that you can use the AR software and the 3DS camera to inject 3D models into your room or wherever you happen to have set down the card. It actually works really well and manages to quite convincingly manipulate the top of my desk. However the tutorial was pretty skimpy with letting me know what the other cards did. There's one with Link, one with Mario, one with Kirby, etc. and the game sort of hints that they can be used so that you can take photos that look like Link is running around your kitchen or Samus is pole dancing in the palm of your hand but I can't for the life of me figure it out based on the tutorial alone. I suppose I could read the instruction manual but quite frankly I haven't had to read one of those for a game in well over a decade and I don't much feel like breaking that streak just so I can take pictures of Kirby picking lint out of my bellybutton.

So anyway, on to the games. The real games. The ones that you have to buy separate and are designed to have lasting appeal. And after seeing the current launch titles available for the 3DS you could be forgiven for thinking there really aren't any real games at all. There are several renditions of Nintendogs, which only differ significantly from their DS predecessors in that they now have cats too. Mostly it's a bunch of stuff I don't give a crap about. My brother got two games for 3DS; Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition and the even more absurdly titled Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars 3D. Shadow Wars 3D actually reminded me a lot of the Advance Wars game in that it's a sort of turn based RTS mixed genre  type thing and I actually saw quite a lot of potential in there from the opening mission I played. SSF IV 3D was also pretty cool and featured some interesting new fighting angles to take advantage of the whole 3D thing and some neat touch screen stuff that will help balance out the slightly fiddley controls. The story for SSF IV 3D is fairly typical of the series. There's some very evil organisation that wants to do something evil to the world but nobody quite knows what and they figure the best way to achieve this evil goal is to hold a fighting tournament. I know not a single sane person on the planet plays Street Fighter games for their gripping narrative but I don't really understand why there needs to be such a complex shambles of a story just to set up a series of situations in which people bitch slap each other for 2 minutes or so.

In closing I see a lot of potential in the 3DS and I'd say that the console is largely selling off of that. The 3D effect works extremely well and, as Nintendo seemed quite keen to bang on about, you don't need to wear any glasses for it. There are quite a number of interesting games for the 3DS on the horizon, although I can't for the life of me figure out why they haven't got at least one of them ready for launch? I also find it amusing that so many of the titles of the games announced for the 3DS have the word 3D in them. It's kind of like we've come full circle from over a decade ago when people would put the word 3D in the title because it had a 3D model in it or because you could rotate your character 360 degrees. I mean that infamous SNES game Noah's Ark 3D was boasting 3D in it's title and that game looks like a garbage pancake. It makes me feel kind of old as I scoff at the absurdity of it all. But when The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D finally comes out my snorts of smug superiority will no doubt be silenced somewhat as I suck Nintendo's dick.