Nintendo 3DS puts 3-D world at your fingertips
Nintendo is looking to conjure up a little March Madness of its own.
The gamemaker’s new Nintendo 3DS handheld system hits stores Sunday. The $250 successor to the 7-year-old Nintendo DS ó the most popular portable game system ever, with nearly 145 million units sold ó displays 3-D games and other content without the need for special glasses.
That wow factor ó the first consumer 3-D-without-glasses application ó is expected to make the system hard to find, even though retailers such as Best Buy and GameStop plan to host midnight launch events. Prices have already hit $500 for some 3DS systems on eBay. “Consumers are going to have to expect for at least the first year that possibly finding a 3DS might be difficult,” says EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich.
Nintendo aims to ship 4 million 3DS systems globally by the end of March. On Feb. 26, the first day it was available in Japan, consumers bought more than 400,000. The system also launches in Europe on Friday.
In addition to Nintendo’s own titles, such as submarine game Steel Diver, flying game Pilotwings Resort and nintendogs + cats, there are 15 others, including Electronic Arts’ Madden Football, Capcom’s Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition, and Ubisoft’s Rayman 3D. (Games cost about $40.)
“We think that the 3DS is an awesome machine,” says Tony Key of Ubisoft, which has three other 3DS games out Sunday and more than 15 in development. “It has a lot of features, including an accelerometer and gyroscope (to sense motion and speed) and the 3-D, that really make it … a unique piece of hardware.”
Built into the system are several games as well as other features, including three cameras (a 3-D pair and a single one) that let you take 3-D pictures and create Mii avatars. Face Raiders puts your face or that of another person onto flying enemies that attack you from all sides ó you move the system left, right, up and down to target them.
Also included: “augmented reality” games that spawn characters and enemies as you aim the 3DS’ lens at cards placed on your coffee table. In an augmented-reality archery game, “looking down into your table, it looks like there is a pit,” says Brian Crecente of game news site Kotaku.com. “You actually have to walk around to see all sides of this pit because there is an underground chamber” from which targets emerge.
A built-in pedometer rewards you with virtual coins for walking with the 3DS; the device’s StreetPass mode exchanges information between two 3DS systems and adds new game data. “They have done this great job of intertwining the physicality of this new type of gaming with their games,” Crecente says. “It speaks to (the 3DS’) potential.”
Nintendo recommends children ages 6 and under not play in 3-D mode (the display has a depth slider that adjusts the effects, with a low setting of standard 2-D). “That non-3-D option is very smart,” Divnich says. “I think Nintendo is just being cautious. But we don’t really know what the short-term or long-term effects of watching 3-D are, not just games but movies as well.”
Those lucky shoppers who get the early 3DS systems will play a critical part in the product’s future, says Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime. “As they show off content like the (augmented-reality) games and the Mii Maker, I do think that will get non-gamers to say, ‘Wow, I need to give this a look.’ ”
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