When it comes to the 3D aspect of the Nintendo 3DS, I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Don’t get me wrong: I was very impressed with the technology when I first saw it in-person, and there are several 3DS titles atop my “DO WANT” list. I’m sure my colleagues have plenty of praise for the system, most of which I’ll agree to without hesitation. That being said, Nintendo gave me 2-3 minutes with a tech demo at their media briefing on June 15th followed by an additional hour with their software lineup later on during the expo, giving me plenty of opportunities to develop my opinions.
The 3D effect has its limitations. As of E3, the screen technology employed for the Nintendo 3DS has a very small viewing angle. The handheld practically requires you to be dead center with the screen at a “normal” playing distance. Moving my head roughly six inches to the side during each of my sessions resulted in the stereoscopic image going out of focus. The same thing happened when I moved my head up and down, or forward and back relative to the screen. The viewing angle is wide enough that if you sit down to play and hold the system normally, you’ll be fine – you naturally find the right position and your eyes quickly adjust to the 3D without fail. However, if you move your head around or tilt the screen away for any reason, it might take a moment to find that “sweet spot” again. I certainly found this to be an issue a few times during my 3DS trials. The system’s predecessor, the DSi XL, may be designed as a social handheld, with its large screen and wide viewing angle for your friends and family to gather around, but the 3DS is very much a single-user device.
In addition, the decision to not use 3D on the touch screen or add touch to the top, 3D screen is understandable, but unfortunate nonetheless. Iwata explained that finger smudges on a 3D screen would negatively impact the 3D effect. Likewise, an obstruction of any kind (be they finger smudges or your stylus-holding hand in front of the screen) would also mess with the stereoscopic image being delivered to your eyes. The resulting tradeoff is that most of the action in our games will now happen primarily on the top screen, while any touch controls will remain on the bottom screen. Generally, this isn’t a huge deal – it’s already the case with many current DS games. The games that will be affected most, however, are the games where we would previously interact directly with the game environments. The gameplay from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks may need to be re-invented. Nintendo may need to take a step back to figure out how to do WarioWare. The actual game demo that made this blatantly obvious was Nintendogs + Cats.
Part of the brilliance of the original Nintendogs was that your interacted directly with your puppies. I had friends you wouldn’t normally expect to be interested in Nintendogs that were instantly sold on the games (and in some cases, the system itself) when they tried out an in-store demo, pet the puppies directly, and elicited a lifelike reaction. In Nintendogs + Cats for the Nintendo 3DS, you still have to do all your petting and touch-interaction with the bottom screen, while an additional cursor mirrors your actions and interacts with the puppies that have moved to the top screen. It’s great to see the puppies in 3D, but I couldn’t help but feel more removed from the environment compared to when I experienced the original games. You’ll get used to it, of course – if you can imagine playing your DS with the touch calibration offset by about three inches, it’s just like that.
On top of the 3D enhancements, the 3DS enjoys a good boost in processing power and media storage. That means more polygons and better textures, resulting in the GameCube/Wii-like impressiveness of the graphics. These graphical capabilities looked absolutely gorgeous in the demos shown, particularly in Star Fox 64 3D, Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, Resident Evil: Revelations, and Dead or Alive 3D. It’s even more impressive when you consider that all of these visuals are being done on considerably low resolution screens.
For practical purposes, the screens have resolutions of 400×240 pixels for the 3D screen on top, and 320×240 pixels for the touch screen on bottom. In actuality, the top screen outputs a resolution of 800×240 pixels, which is split between each eye. By comparison, the Nintendo DS displays 256×192* pixels on each screen, the Sony PlayStation Portable sports a 480×272 pixel display, and the iPhone 4‘s “Retina” display outputs a resolution of 960×640. It’s actually a bit of a shame that the 3DS comes with such a low resolution. You know those beautiful HD games on your Xbox 360? Many of those are packed onto single-layer DVDs, which are only just over twice the size of the 2GB game cards available to 3DS developers at launch. The processor inside the 3DS may not be powerful enough to output continuous HD video, but think of the gorgeous textures you could store on a 2GB card at launch (and larger cards in the future), and how they could have benefitted from a higher resolution.
(Side note: The three cameras aboard the 3DS have resolutions of 640×480, which I assume you’ll be able to view in full resolution by saving to SD card and viewing on your computer. How you’ll be able to view them in 3D at full resolution is beyond me.)
Getting away from the screens and 3D, one of the things you’ll notice upon looking at and holding the Nintendo 3DS is that it’s clearly a descendant of the DS Lite and DSi. Clamshell design, four action buttons on the right, D-pad on the left, two shoulder buttons, microphone, cameras, and two screens. The new “Slide Pad” added for 360-degree analog control is not unlike the PSP “nub” in terms of functional design, but it’s larger and padded in such a way that it resembles the form and feels similar to the analog sticks you’re used to. The Start and Select buttons have been moved to just below the touch screen, flanking a familiar “Home” button while will likely mimic its function from the Wii and/or the function of lightly pressing the Power button on the DSi. These buttons could also be moved in future hardware revisions to make way for a larger screen size. The only other control factors – motion control by accelerometer, orientation control by gyro sensor, and touch control by a telescoping stylus – were not demonstrated or shown at E3. I’m sure they and other still-secret features will be demonstrated in the coming months.
Finally, while I know the overall design of the 3DS is far from final, I must say that I hope the material and finish used for the Nintendo 3DS prototypes shown in at this year’s E3 Expo makes it onto the final product. The casing felt extremely sturdy and durable, seemed much more scratch resistant than all of my existing DS models, and was “ooh, ahh”-ingly shiny. I am a little disappointed that the storage slot for the stylus has returned to the top of the system next to the game card slot (and on the user’s left side, no less), but that’s a minor gripe and a small price to pay for more useful hardware on the inside.
To close, I need to reiterate that the overall negative vibe of these impressions aren’t reflective of my thoughts of the Nintendo 3DS as a whole. I truly am impressed with what I saw from Nintendo’s newest handheld, and if you want to read many of the good praises shared by several of us from our team, I suggest you read Jason’s impressions. Still, I felt the need to communicate that many of the concerns some of us had relating to the use of parallax barriers in a DS handheld are indeed justified, and that Nintendo’s latest creation still leaves plenty to be desired. Nintendo still has a lot to reveal about the new device, and what’s already there is definitely not finalized – but I doubt we’ll see improvements in viewing angles or screen resolutions by launch.
Be sure to read my software impressions as well – coming soon!
*This post has been edited from its original version to correct a typo that suggested the Nintendo DS had a higher resolution.
