Review: Nintendo 3DS

What's so appealing about 3-D, anyway?

A while back, I saw two landmark 3-D movies in the same six-month time span: Avatar and the revival of Captain EO at Disneyland. The latter, a 1986 Michael Jackson flick, used 3-D in the sort of ham-handed ridiculous way it had always been used: Asteroids flew into the seats. Evil monsters poked their claws and spears into your face. Cue screams and laughter from audience.

For a movie so closely identified with the current 3-D boom, James Cameron's Avatar never tried any of these tricks. I quickly forgot I was watching a "3-D movie." The depth, the added sensation of things being further away, had the subtle effect of making everything seem real, touchable. The 3-D technology was the medium, not the message.

The Nintendo 3DS is at its best when it does Avatar, not Captain EO. Games that make players go gaga over the innovative glasses-free 3-D display are all well and good. But it's the way the small screen's 3-D effects make every 3DS game look like a little animated diorama in a shoebox that impresses me the most. Something about that third dimension brings games to life.

The $250 3DS, already available in Japan and coming stateside March 27, is a gadget with the weight of the world on its bezels. Nintendo has enjoyed uninterrupted dominance in the handheld gaming space since it practically created that space with Game Boy in 1989. This is now under assault from Apple's suite of touchable phones and tablets, which play an increasingly enjoyable library of games for significantly lower prices.

Once again, Nintendo's proposal is typical Nintendo — staunchly conservative and wildly innovative in equal measure. On the one hand, it emphasizes $40 retail games over cheap downloads, and the company says it won't try to attract indie "garage game" developers. On the other hand, it has positively leapfrogged the competition by utilizing a glasses-free 3-D screen, in the same way that the original Nintendo DS led the way with its touch interface.

As other writers have already elaborated upon, the 3-D screen is made significantly better by the "volume control" slider to its right. You can crank the 3-D up all the way if you want to enjoy the full depth-of-field effects, but to view these you'll need to hold the 3DS rather close to your face, pointed square at your eyeballs.

This is not nearly as taxing as it sounds — I've played it at length with the machine in just that position and never felt tired. But if you want, you can crank down the 3-D, sacrificing the full force of its power for a more relaxed viewing angle.

Screen aside, the 3DS looks a lot like the original DS. There's a D-pad, four face buttons, L and R shoulder buttons and Select and Start buttons. Oh, and there's the lower screen, which isn't 3-D but still has a touch interface.

The big additions are a comfortable analog "slide pad" joystick and a 3-D camera, which faces outward, so you can take stereoscopic pictures of the world around you. Every Nintendo 3DS comes with a 2-GB SD card, and photos are saved directly onto this in two formats — JPG and MPO.

When you look at the images on the 3DS' tiny screen, they may not seem so bad. When you actually open them on a PC, they look pretty much awful. But because it uses the standard MPO file format, you can then open those 3-D images in other viewers or use them on other devices. (Nintendo says it will eventually update 3DS' firmware to take 3-D video.)

The 3DS is packed full of preloaded games and applications, some of which are more interesting than others. (I wager none will prove as compelling as Wii Sports.) Several "augmented reality" games use the 3-D camera to overlay gameplay onto a real-time image of the real world around you.

Of these, the most fun is Face Raiders, in which a photo of your face is transformed into a series of grotesque laughing enemies that fly all over the room and must be shot down. It's not the game's very simple point-and-shoot mechanic that makes it fun, it's the hilarious comic expressions that it morphs your face into. Nintendo is still the master of these little touches.

Other features use the system's wireless connection. You can set three different connections to various Wi-Fi hot spots, and when the 3DS gets into range of any of them it will automatically connect and search for new content on Nintendo's servers. The StreetPass mode constantly searches for other people's 3DS consoles and automatically exchanges data with them if you get within range. You can swap your Mii characters, which you can create on the system or import from your Wii, for example.

You can also drop the 3DS into sleep mode by just closing the lid, and it will continue to search for other DS systems and hot spots while running on a minimal battery charge. I was able to leave the 3DS sleeping and carry it around for two days without having to recharge it. And with so many reasons to always have it on me as I go about my day, I fully plan on doing so.

That said, when you actually have the 3DS open and are playing a game, the battery will drain very quickly. If you've got the wireless turned on and the screen brightness going at full blast, you'll be staring down the Blinking Red Light of Impending Death within about three hours.

Turn the Wi-Fi off and crank down the brightness and you might squeeze another 90 minutes out of it, if you're lucky. To that end, Nintendo has included a convenient charging cradle with each 3DS, and you'd probably better get used to using it regularly.

Eighteen months from now, Nintendo will release the inevitable 3DS Lite and take us for another $250. Until that day arrives, I'm pretty comfortable saying that the Nintendo 3DS is the best gaming platform the company has ever created: The user experience is quite polished in a variety of ways, and its forward-thinking core feature really does make gaming better. Nintendo will sell a lot of them, and glasses-free 3-D will be a big deal in the next generation of gadgets, just like an avalanche of touch screens followed the first DS.

But all that may not be enough to keep smartphones and tablets from siphoning away more and more of the gamers who have long kept Nintendo in charge of the portable-gaming world.

WIRED 3-D visuals are true game-changer. Variety of fun, preloaded apps. Lots of reasons to carry it around in sleep mode.

TIRED Camera images are low-quality. Chews through battery in the blink of an eye. Games start at $40.

Second photo courtesy Nintendo. All other photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com.

Read full coverage of the Nintendo 3DS on Wired's Game|Life.

See Also:- It's Nintendo 3DS Week on Game|Life

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• Exercise on the Go With the Nintendo 3DS
• Full Coverage of Nintendo 3DS on Game|Life