News-Blog: 3DS First Impressions
By Mento 3 Comments
So like many Europeans, I received my Nintendo 3DS from Amazon this morning. I was quite jubilant. Of course, it needed charging before I could do anything.
After letting it charge for its customary 3 and a half hours (which it'll need to do after five hours of action, meaning it has a work/sleep ratio that's even worse than my own) I did a grand tour of the 3DS' features. Here's what I found so far:
3D Camera
This thing's a little trippy, but not any more than the rest of the 3D stuff. It does that stereoscopic thing that I'm sure everyone's read about at this point, and apparently the memory's sufficient for 1200 of these 3D photos which is kind of impressive (that's like ten MyNotebooks!). Other than that, pretty standard lowish-quality phone type camera really. I don't see myself using it much.Mii Maker
Same old Miis. The face recognition stuff for this seems a little janky, but then it might just be that I have a janky face. It seems pretty identical to its Wii counterpart for all intents and purposes and will probably be ignored by me in a similar fashion. Unless I can download a load of good ones from some enterprising person on my friends list. The Miis here also fit into the Augmented Reality stuff too, as well as StreetPass stuff but I'm even less inclined to try that. Though I did just read about that RPG thing so maybe I should try that before continuing this blog. Ah whateve-StreetPass
Never going to use it. I don't go outside. Not anymore. Not while they still have me under surveillance.Augmented Reality
This is what takes up most of the bulk of the built-in apps, separated into several modes and including the Face Raiders game which I'll go into in a moment. Star Cards: Just basically virtual figurines. Mine came with Mario, Samus, Kirby, some Pikmin and Wind Waker Link. Dunno if that's the traditional set-up, but from I've seen from promotional pics elsewhere it is. They can do little poses and you can take photos of them doing little poses. If you wanted to do that for some reason. Seems kind of pointless, but its a nice inexpensive gesture if each Nintendo game gave out more of them. They're numbered, so it's not like they couldn't turn them into a collectible card side-gig either.
AR Shoot: Hitting targets. You do have to spin the camera around to find some of them, so it works best if you're setting the AR card down on a coffee table or something similarly central in a room. A cluttered desk or your own knee is a little more problematic (as I discovered), unless you simply manually move the card around yourself. The game ends once you shoot a dragon that randomly pops up. Because everything needs a boss fight these days apparently.
AR Golf: (Not its real name, but the real name Shot is ambiguously close to Shoot) This one's a little goofier, since terrain will suddenly spring up and it becomes something of a golf/billiards physics puzzle. It reminded me a lot of Kirby's Dream Course, actually. And the dragon shows up again. I'm wondering if all this dragon chasing is code for something.
AR Fishing: Pretty basic fishing game where you only need to snap the 3DS up once to catch something after it bites the line. It seems to have plenty of different kinds of fish to hook though, so it's entirely possible my completionist tendencies will get the better of me and I'll play more of it. I got quite excited when one particularly large fish shadow showed up, only to find it was that friggin' dragon again. C'mon dude, I'm trying to relax with some fishing here.
Face Raiders: Hands down the most terrifying game I've ever played. And I've played Drakengard. Setting aside any easy jokes about one's homely countenance (I've done that once already), the game's downright eerieness comes from the expressions the face ball things make as they attack you (or just goof off in the menus). They come at you from all directions, wearing your face, trying to murder you while laughing with their weird diamond-shaped Andross mouths. It's seriously like a scene from Lawnmower Man. Or a postcard from the Uncanny Grand Canyon. I won't be revisiting it if I can help it. Most troubling, I think, is that the face recognition software had me pegged as a 12 year old girl, despite not shaving recently.
3DS Sound
This one's a little odd. I kind of just expected it to be a music player (which is already an odd thing to use your DS for, though it kind of works if you're intending to take long walks for coins and need something to listen to) but it's apparently a sound recording studio type thing as well. It's more or less applying filters to music and recorded sounds, like making everything resemble 8-bit NES music (which sort of sounds wrong). I dunno, I don't think it'll replace the vastly superior sound mixer software that exists already in DS form. Activity Log
Self explanatory. Mine was kind of empty, but then I've only had the 3DS for a few hours. There's lots of neat little infographics options though for whatever reason, so it's kind of like having your own little PSeG wherever you go. I dunno, this is mostly information people have already heard from Jeff and other game/tech journalist types. I'm thinking now that this whole blog idea was a subconscious attempt to show off my 3DS-having status in a way that didn't seem too douchey. Fission mailed. But seriously, these apps are neat and there's quite a lot of them, cool of Nintendo to go all out for a bunch of proof of concept novelties. Now the long wait for the eShop begins. Nothing stops etc. etc.