Today, with the simultaenous press events in North America and Europe for the 3DS, I expected to hear a date, a price, colors, and maybe a confirmation of what was going to be in the North American 3DS box. I scoffed (rightly, it seems) at those who thought they were going to get surprise game announcements. And I got the biggies: March 27 and $249.99, available in Cosmo Black and Aqua Blue.
Nintendo ended up kind of blowing me away a little, though, with all the additional little tidbits I wasn't expecting. So what I'm going to do in this space here is go through the bits that are most interesting—and man, there are a lot of them—and let you know what sort of impact they're going to have, both on the 3DS itself and yours truly as an owner.
Let's get the biggie out of the way first: Nintendo 3DS debuts some very nice new enhancements to the venerable (and much-maligned) Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
One Friend Code is now all you need for all the 3DS games you will ever own, to get you and your friends hooked up for online play. On top of that, you'll be able to see all your online friends as well as what games they're playing. If you're in the same room, you don't even need to exchange codes at all—you'll just become friends, just like that, like you did in some DS WFC games, except now for the whole shebang.
You may accuse me of being easy to please, but this is, in fact, even more than I wanted. I would have been thrilled with the equivalent of the Mario Kart Wii setup, where you can build up your Friend Roster automatically by using your Wii Address Book to send invites to your friends' consoles; nobody needed to key in a single number with this system, and it helped take a lot of the pain out of per-game Friend Rosters. But this is even better, and I'm certainly not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The one thing that I hope this system has is a per-game access list, though. This is a little something that I've been appreciating since the Wi-Fi Connection debuted in 2005; it may have been more of a side-effect of the way per-game Friend Rosters worked more than an explicit feature, but it was useful nonetheless. Take Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World, for example. You would probably like to friend just about everyone in Mario Kart, but you'd want to hand-select your Animal Crossing friends very carefully, lest you find a tree-murderer at your gates. So I'm hoping that, for games like these, you'll be able to prune those friend lists per-game.
Remember the indicator light? The one that was going to light up when you took your 3DS out walking and picked up new StreetPass or SpotPass data?
Well, as it turns out, this little guy is even more important than we previously thought. When your friends are online, it actually lights up a different color—orange instead of the usual green.
Pair this with the charging dock that is going to be a standard pack-in for all 3DS systems, and you've got an actually pretty fantastic feature: you'll be able to see at a glance, from across the room, whether you've got friends to play games with. With this feature, Nintendo just took a huge leap from "carefully schedule time to play together" right over the current standard "see friends are online if you happen to be playing the same console they are" and into territory where online play can happen totally spontaneously.
When it's not showing you you've got friends ready to go, it still lights up green to show you you've picked up content. (Actually, I was wondering whether it might alternate green and orange... who knows?) And indicators will show up on the 3DS' home screen as well to highlight what applications may have picked up new data—green for StreetPass, blue for SpotPass. Great stuff; clean, simple, to the point and unmissable.
We've known for a long time that you can suspend a game you're playing and go into the 3DS' home menu with that dedicated button. And we've known that one of the things you can do in the home menu is use the 3DS' web browser. But now, today, we find out there's a notepad, too. And the notepad is friggin' awesome.
Why am I so excited about a notepad, anyway? Well, not only is it readily available at any time during my 3DS playtime, but it even goes so far as to freeze-frame both the top and bottom screens of the game you were playing so you can actually see what you were doing to copy information into your notes.
So, yes. I'm a little excited over this little notepad. And the rest of the firmware is great, too, of course; the web browser is going to be very useful, too. But yes, a notepad. *fist pump*
Here's a lesser-known fact: the new Nintendo eShop, which we previously knew was going to have lots of awesome things like demos and game media and all sorts of fun stuff, is also going to undergo a currency change.
Prior Nintendo shops have been all about the Nintendo Points. $20 would get you 2,000; pretty straightforward. But with 3DS, Nintendo is now switching to a cash-based system. Details are scarce (and as of press time, I haven't yet got clarification—understandable, since Nintendo is a little busy today), but it's reasonable to assume that this means you can put in your credit card number and pay exactly $8 for the game you want instead of having to load in a fixed number of points and have change sitting around on your system. Of course, if you like getting your game credit at retail, you can still buy prepaid cards for your 3DS.
While I'm talking about the shop, we got one additional interesting detail about the DSi-to-3DS transfer we heard about before: once the service is available after launch, we'll also be able to transfer 3DSWare between 3DS's.
Again, we don't have total details, but it's not hard to imagine a rather unique DRM system that is pretty much totally unheard-of. There will be a limited number of times you can transfer software, but assuming the system allows you to transfer individual titles as opposed to just one system's entire collection in one shot, we could gain the ability to pass on purchased DSiWare and 3DSWare to others, subject to the transfer count. Think about it: you would have basically have gained limited sale rights over a downloadable title. It's speculation, but it's pretty exciting to think about.
So what else do we know?
The one other thing I know is that just from looking at what's going on with the whole system, I am really impressed. We went from last E3 knowing there was some sort of "Tag Mode Plus" in the wings to all this, which is basically more than I ever imagined would come from a Nintendo system. And it all just looks so well-designed, too... it's making the user-interface geek in me go a bit ga-ga.
I still want to see more software I really want—and maybe 3DSWare will satisfy me on that front yet—but this is a fantastic-looking foundation for it all and I think I'm going to just have fun playing a few things here and there, alongside tried-and-true DS titles, on this system until they arrive. I cannot wait to lay my hands on this thing come March.
Nintendo ended up kind of blowing me away a little, though, with all the additional little tidbits I wasn't expecting. So what I'm going to do in this space here is go through the bits that are most interesting—and man, there are a lot of them—and let you know what sort of impact they're going to have, both on the 3DS itself and yours truly as an owner.
One Friend Code to rule them all
Let's get the biggie out of the way first: Nintendo 3DS debuts some very nice new enhancements to the venerable (and much-maligned) Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.
One Friend Code is now all you need for all the 3DS games you will ever own, to get you and your friends hooked up for online play. On top of that, you'll be able to see all your online friends as well as what games they're playing. If you're in the same room, you don't even need to exchange codes at all—you'll just become friends, just like that, like you did in some DS WFC games, except now for the whole shebang.
You may accuse me of being easy to please, but this is, in fact, even more than I wanted. I would have been thrilled with the equivalent of the Mario Kart Wii setup, where you can build up your Friend Roster automatically by using your Wii Address Book to send invites to your friends' consoles; nobody needed to key in a single number with this system, and it helped take a lot of the pain out of per-game Friend Rosters. But this is even better, and I'm certainly not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
The one thing that I hope this system has is a per-game access list, though. This is a little something that I've been appreciating since the Wi-Fi Connection debuted in 2005; it may have been more of a side-effect of the way per-game Friend Rosters worked more than an explicit feature, but it was useful nonetheless. Take Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossing: Wild World, for example. You would probably like to friend just about everyone in Mario Kart, but you'd want to hand-select your Animal Crossing friends very carefully, lest you find a tree-murderer at your gates. So I'm hoping that, for games like these, you'll be able to prune those friend lists per-game.
I see the light
Remember the indicator light? The one that was going to light up when you took your 3DS out walking and picked up new StreetPass or SpotPass data?
Well, as it turns out, this little guy is even more important than we previously thought. When your friends are online, it actually lights up a different color—orange instead of the usual green.
Pair this with the charging dock that is going to be a standard pack-in for all 3DS systems, and you've got an actually pretty fantastic feature: you'll be able to see at a glance, from across the room, whether you've got friends to play games with. With this feature, Nintendo just took a huge leap from "carefully schedule time to play together" right over the current standard "see friends are online if you happen to be playing the same console they are" and into territory where online play can happen totally spontaneously.
When it's not showing you you've got friends ready to go, it still lights up green to show you you've picked up content. (Actually, I was wondering whether it might alternate green and orange... who knows?) And indicators will show up on the 3DS' home screen as well to highlight what applications may have picked up new data—green for StreetPass, blue for SpotPass. Great stuff; clean, simple, to the point and unmissable.
Take note
We've known for a long time that you can suspend a game you're playing and go into the 3DS' home menu with that dedicated button. And we've known that one of the things you can do in the home menu is use the 3DS' web browser. But now, today, we find out there's a notepad, too. And the notepad is friggin' awesome.
Why am I so excited about a notepad, anyway? Well, not only is it readily available at any time during my 3DS playtime, but it even goes so far as to freeze-frame both the top and bottom screens of the game you were playing so you can actually see what you were doing to copy information into your notes.
So, yes. I'm a little excited over this little notepad. And the rest of the firmware is great, too, of course; the web browser is going to be very useful, too. But yes, a notepad. *fist pump*
Cash and carry
Here's a lesser-known fact: the new Nintendo eShop, which we previously knew was going to have lots of awesome things like demos and game media and all sorts of fun stuff, is also going to undergo a currency change.
Prior Nintendo shops have been all about the Nintendo Points. $20 would get you 2,000; pretty straightforward. But with 3DS, Nintendo is now switching to a cash-based system. Details are scarce (and as of press time, I haven't yet got clarification—understandable, since Nintendo is a little busy today), but it's reasonable to assume that this means you can put in your credit card number and pay exactly $8 for the game you want instead of having to load in a fixed number of points and have change sitting around on your system. Of course, if you like getting your game credit at retail, you can still buy prepaid cards for your 3DS.
While I'm talking about the shop, we got one additional interesting detail about the DSi-to-3DS transfer we heard about before: once the service is available after launch, we'll also be able to transfer 3DSWare between 3DS's.
Again, we don't have total details, but it's not hard to imagine a rather unique DRM system that is pretty much totally unheard-of. There will be a limited number of times you can transfer software, but assuming the system allows you to transfer individual titles as opposed to just one system's entire collection in one shot, we could gain the ability to pass on purchased DSiWare and 3DSWare to others, subject to the transfer count. Think about it: you would have basically have gained limited sale rights over a downloadable title. It's speculation, but it's pretty exciting to think about.
And much more!
So what else do we know?
- A few existing things got official new names. Game Coins, which I talked about in my last editorial, are now Play Coins. Thumbs up. The Slide Pad is now the Circle Pad. Thumbs down.
- Very pleased to hear they're not varying the pack-in list from what Japan gets. We still get the 2GB SD card (believe it or not, I need one; I'm running out of large SD cards) and the critically important charging dock—now we know the dock is extra-important too, with the indicator light showing off online friends.
- About the only thing we don't have good info on is what games will be available when. There's talk of a 2½-month launch window and conflicting information coming in from all sides. More clarity on this front would have helped.
- I am a teensy bit worried about one thing from NOA's PR today: "For owners who choose to activate it, the StreetPassâ„¢ feature is capable of exchanging game information with other Nintendo 3DS systems..." For those who choose to activate it? Look, I'm all for opt-in, but I'm a little scared of this. I'm scared it's going to kill StreetPass. I hope the system does a great job of preaching the benefits on initial setup.
- Sega is going to release Crush 3D sometime "soon." Crush was a really cool PSP game about perspective I never got around to trying but really, really need to. Now I don't have that hanging over my head anymore and it'll be in mind-blowing 3D to boot. Sega, this week, I love you. We will not speak of Sonic Colors DS.
The one other thing I know is that just from looking at what's going on with the whole system, I am really impressed. We went from last E3 knowing there was some sort of "Tag Mode Plus" in the wings to all this, which is basically more than I ever imagined would come from a Nintendo system. And it all just looks so well-designed, too... it's making the user-interface geek in me go a bit ga-ga.
I still want to see more software I really want—and maybe 3DSWare will satisfy me on that front yet—but this is a fantastic-looking foundation for it all and I think I'm going to just have fun playing a few things here and there, alongside tried-and-true DS titles, on this system until they arrive. I cannot wait to lay my hands on this thing come March.