One of the biggest reasons to be at this E3 was to hopefully lay hands on Nintendo's brand new 3DS—which we indeed got to do. While the system actually looks fairly unassuming at first glance, not being a radical overhaul of the DS design that's served Nintendo so well, it turns out to be a very impressive little machine once you get your hands on one, tethered as it may be to a fixture or one of the 3DSettes.
Of course, the key experience is the 3D itself. As Nintendo president Satoru Iwata noted in his E3 presentation of the system, the top screen is the only one showing 3D effects, since they kept the bottom screen as a touch screen and they found fingerprints and stylus use interfered quite a bit with that mission. The top screen is also the only wide screen; the touch screen, while it does sport a resolution bump making it noticeably sharper than the DS and DSi, remains 4:3.
The 3D effect is really quite fantastic, if you hold the display horizontally parallel to your face—tilting it too much left or right will introduce crosstalk and make the display rather unviewable. This becomes a real problem, as Amber noted when we were discussing this last night, as action-heavy games could tend to make the system shift in your hands. But as we compared notes, we arrived at the conclusion that maybe across the large number of systems on display there, there was a bit of manufacturing variation at work here in the quality of the 3D screens—we found that we had quite different experiences with the same demos, presumably while playing them on different systems. Hopefully, this is a problem that will get worked out as the system approaches more wide-scale manufacturing, and maybe the final system will be more resistant to shifts in one's hands as well.
There was also some weird lag in some demos causing a sort of 3D afterimage effect, as if each eye was getting a different frame of the action instead of just an alternate viewpoint on the same frame. This was primarily on fast-moving scenes—Dean noted it in the Mario Kart noninteractive demo in particular—but it also seems pretty reasonable that if our theory is correct, it can be fixed up in software before launch.
The graphical level on display is quite impressive; for those keeping score, we think what was on display is better than PS2, definitely as good as GameCube, and probably on the level of early Wii demos. Though we currently aren't quite sure if antialiasing is in play—I thought the Nintendogs + Cats frisbee looked jaggy, though Dean didn't see it—it certainly isn't causing the same disconcerting effect we got from Sony's press conference.
Another interesting aspect is how the 3D adjustment slider seems to influence—or, in some cases, not be able to influence—3D rendering itself. While all Nintendo's demos were rendered in realtime, some third parties had prerendered movies running on the system, and some of these weren't adjustable via the slider at all. I thought that perhaps the slider actually changed the angles realtime-rendered demos displayed their 3D frames at, which is why it had no effect on these movies, but then my colleagues here noted that the movie trailers were adjustable, so I'm not sure. Either way, it seems reasonable to assume that a solution could be worked out to at least make prerendered movies turn off 3D entirely in the slider's "off" position, displaying only one of the eye's views on the screen instead of both. I'd be surprised not to find this in the final product.
For 3D control, Nintendo has introduced an analog slide pad and pushed the old d-pad a little further down, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with this baby at all. It feels great and rolls smoothly around the full 360° of motion. I was actually rather surprised to find I loved it so much, as I've used other controllers with the technology in the past with PCs and found them slightly wonky. There's no such issue here; this pad is great and will help bring a lot to the table.
While we'll be covering the larger games on display a little later, we did want to bring your attention to a few of the demos that were running on the system. Apart from a group of demos that were just movies—prerendered or otherwise—there were also a couple neat concepts like a showcase of classic NES and SNES games made to render in 3D. Many of these were just adding 3D-ness to the existing sprite layers, but some added effects like how the playfield NES Golf was tilted back. No announcements were made on this front, but it seems at least likely Nintendo's considering bringing some of their classic library as downloads on the system—though we expect it may take a little more development work for these than a typical Virtual Console release does now.
The 3DS is an impressive piece of hardware. Even in its non-final form—expect it to look at least a little different before it finally hits the streets—it's a great product with what we hope is only a little bit of shaking-out yet to go in the 3D department before it sees release. Even if it wasn't 3D, I'd still love the thing, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what developers are going to do with it.
Of course, the key experience is the 3D itself. As Nintendo president Satoru Iwata noted in his E3 presentation of the system, the top screen is the only one showing 3D effects, since they kept the bottom screen as a touch screen and they found fingerprints and stylus use interfered quite a bit with that mission. The top screen is also the only wide screen; the touch screen, while it does sport a resolution bump making it noticeably sharper than the DS and DSi, remains 4:3.
The 3D effect is really quite fantastic, if you hold the display horizontally parallel to your face—tilting it too much left or right will introduce crosstalk and make the display rather unviewable. This becomes a real problem, as Amber noted when we were discussing this last night, as action-heavy games could tend to make the system shift in your hands. But as we compared notes, we arrived at the conclusion that maybe across the large number of systems on display there, there was a bit of manufacturing variation at work here in the quality of the 3D screens—we found that we had quite different experiences with the same demos, presumably while playing them on different systems. Hopefully, this is a problem that will get worked out as the system approaches more wide-scale manufacturing, and maybe the final system will be more resistant to shifts in one's hands as well.
There was also some weird lag in some demos causing a sort of 3D afterimage effect, as if each eye was getting a different frame of the action instead of just an alternate viewpoint on the same frame. This was primarily on fast-moving scenes—Dean noted it in the Mario Kart noninteractive demo in particular—but it also seems pretty reasonable that if our theory is correct, it can be fixed up in software before launch.
The graphical level on display is quite impressive; for those keeping score, we think what was on display is better than PS2, definitely as good as GameCube, and probably on the level of early Wii demos. Though we currently aren't quite sure if antialiasing is in play—I thought the Nintendogs + Cats frisbee looked jaggy, though Dean didn't see it—it certainly isn't causing the same disconcerting effect we got from Sony's press conference.
Another interesting aspect is how the 3D adjustment slider seems to influence—or, in some cases, not be able to influence—3D rendering itself. While all Nintendo's demos were rendered in realtime, some third parties had prerendered movies running on the system, and some of these weren't adjustable via the slider at all. I thought that perhaps the slider actually changed the angles realtime-rendered demos displayed their 3D frames at, which is why it had no effect on these movies, but then my colleagues here noted that the movie trailers were adjustable, so I'm not sure. Either way, it seems reasonable to assume that a solution could be worked out to at least make prerendered movies turn off 3D entirely in the slider's "off" position, displaying only one of the eye's views on the screen instead of both. I'd be surprised not to find this in the final product.
For 3D control, Nintendo has introduced an analog slide pad and pushed the old d-pad a little further down, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with this baby at all. It feels great and rolls smoothly around the full 360° of motion. I was actually rather surprised to find I loved it so much, as I've used other controllers with the technology in the past with PCs and found them slightly wonky. There's no such issue here; this pad is great and will help bring a lot to the table.
While we'll be covering the larger games on display a little later, we did want to bring your attention to a few of the demos that were running on the system. Apart from a group of demos that were just movies—prerendered or otherwise—there were also a couple neat concepts like a showcase of classic NES and SNES games made to render in 3D. Many of these were just adding 3D-ness to the existing sprite layers, but some added effects like how the playfield NES Golf was tilted back. No announcements were made on this front, but it seems at least likely Nintendo's considering bringing some of their classic library as downloads on the system—though we expect it may take a little more development work for these than a typical Virtual Console release does now.
The 3DS is an impressive piece of hardware. Even in its non-final form—expect it to look at least a little different before it finally hits the streets—it's a great product with what we hope is only a little bit of shaking-out yet to go in the 3D department before it sees release. Even if it wasn't 3D, I'd still love the thing, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what developers are going to do with it.