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Nintendo 3DS Early Impressions
Now that E3 attendees have had a chance to try out the new revision of Nintendo's portable console, critiques of the 3D effect and updated layout are starting to filter in. Opinion thus far has been mostly positive. Wired writes, "The graphics, which are much more advanced than you’d expect from Nintendo, left me pretty much in disbelief. They're on a level with Sony’s PSP, probably even a little better than that. But the eye-popping 3-D effect makes everything that much richer." According to the Guardian's Games blog, it works "beautifully." They add, "You can perceive 3D only if the console is directly in front of you, but this is fine for handheld gaming. I actually found it pretty adaptable in terms of viewing from different vertical positions. It was much more sensitive if the handheld was turned slightly to the left or right, but really, it coped perfectly with the slight shifts and jerks you'd get on a morning commute." During Shigeru Miyamoto's annual dev roundtable, he explained how Nintendo felt that particular types of games, such as shooters, benefit more from the 3D effect than others, and how Nintendo hopes to update as many older games as they can to incorporate 3D gameplay in addition to 3D graphics.
An explosion of porn apps for the 3ds.
(ha)
If you don't know who Malstrom is, read his site, particularly the article called Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy, where he basically bashes hardcore gaming and... well, see for yourself.
His blog has opened my eyes. More people should read his stuff. He might not be right about everything, but it's a refreshing change from the crappy hardcore industry press and idiot "analysts" who pull stuff out of their behinds.
Sounds like such a simple way of implementing an 3d effect. Gotta love it. Cant wait to give it a try.
Here's one post where Malstrom describes Nintendo as beating the crap out of Sony, which is sort of amusing, but this post explains how Nintendo is directly targeting Sony with the 3DS. According to Malstrom, Nintendo is basically doing whatever it can to destroy Sony. Completely.
It really was beautiful. This looks to be for games what Avatar was for 3d movies. Unlike the active shutter 3D demos, this one seemed to suffer far less drawbacks. Including, not having to wear expensive shutter glasses.
The effect actually adds a lot to the perception of the game world in most cases, though there are obviously the instances where it seems like a gimic. But even as a gimic, it makes the 3d world feel all that more real.
And the 3D camera is rather impressive too.
I say it's payback. Sony came into the gaming world with little to no respect for developers or the gaming community as a whole. Sony put the focus in on the 3d, and the specs, and the commercialism that we come to expect in the gaming world of today. The gaming world of yesterday had an entirely different ecosphere which in my opinion was better for the developer and the gamers. The gaming industry used to be able making quality games, fun games, which may not have been 3d but which were much more fun because they weren't.
Look at Mortal Kombat and the NBA Jam series. These games were never supposed to be 3d and never were as good when forced into 3d. The graphics actually looked photorealistic when they were 2d and the games were more fun as 2d, so why were these series forced into 3d? Sony had a policy where if your game wasn't 3d they didn't want to let you release it. This is why starting with the PSX and really with the PS2 we saw the death of all 2d gaming, even revolutionary 2d technologies which had photorealistic graphics, because Sony wanted to use their formula of hardware over software.
Now their formula isn't working anymore. Good hardware can only take you so far and we are once again entering into an era where games are supposed to be fun again. I think if Sony were to leave the gaming industry alone on the software level and just make hardware we'd all be better off. Sony has no business making software and no real understanding of the gaming industry as Sony is a hardware company. Perhaps it's time for Sony to follow Sega and move on to specialize in what they are good at, and thats making gaming computers, chips, graphics engines and other hardware components to be used by Nintendo or Microsoft.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyw8YGuEEyg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bUm4_dyiI4
Same exact gameplay. No real graphical improvements. So why is it "3d" and they claim the graphics are "updated", when they aren't? 3d doesn't always make a game more fun or always make the graphics better.
Does the 3D screen make the images "pop" out like one of those double concave mirrors or does the image "sink in" so it feels like you look into a box?
And did anyone think to bring a stereo camera and take some photos?
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
If I was in charge of Nintendo, I would put a big chunk of flash in the 3DS, and include a browser, e-mail client, and media player. And also make a smart phone version as well.
Do they really think that people want to carry a separate portable gaming device, media player, and pda or smart phone in this day and age? Especially when you consider that you can buy a low end Zune or iPod Touch 8GB in the same price range as a Nintendo DSi.
The predictable consequence that the gamecube and dreamcast failed and the PS2 still sells?
Oh poor Sony, how will they ever survive the PS2!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your 3D newsletter.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
>"Nintendo hopes to update as many older games as they can to incorporate 3D gameplay in addition to 3D graphics."
So you can buy all your old games yet again!
VHS
DVD
Blueray
Blueray 3D...
"If you tilt the unit away from your face so it's almost at a 180-degree angle, you can still see the 3-D effect."
How the fsck do you manage to see the screen when you've turned it completely away from your face?
So why is it "3d"
Because otherwise, Sony wouldn't digitally sign it for booting on the retail console.
Also, because it's more expensive to draw every player in 2D at every angle. NBA Jam on 16-bit systems used a generic basketball player body scaled to about five sizes along with unique character heads. To add a new player, only the head needed to be redrawn at all angles. But now at least the upmarket players expect more than eight angles and numbers on uniforms, and at some point, it becomes easier for the artists just to make an octahedron, pull at it until it becomes a head, and wrap a texture around it.
According to IGN, "If you twist the system you'll get double images and lose the 3D, but it's simple to keep the stereoscopic effect within view."
Reference: http://ds.ign.com/articles/109/1098014p1.html
I'd love to see the 3d tech paired with a smaller version of Microsoft Kinect in the future. It would be cool if you could actually see the air buttons you are interacting with.
I liked Sega and all but seriously in the 90's they did crazy thing after crazy thing and it was their own fault. I mean lets just name a few. During the time the Saturn was out they never managed to make a new Sonic game. To make matters worse the only new Sonic game they had was being done by some US division who Japanese developers would openly fight with. (You'd think they'd have one of their major divisions in Japan working on it but nope.) Oh, that whole stealth release of the Saturn was a major cluster fuck that I don't need to re-iterate since there's plenty on it. Oh, and speaking of Japan did you know they once cancelled a game because they were worried it would compete too much with a Japanese game? It's true, they cancelled Eternal Champions for the Saturn because they were worried it would compete with the Virtua Fighter series. Why was this one amazingly stupid? At best EC would have come out 6-12 months after VF2, long after sales of VF2 died off and VF2 was the last VF game for the Saturn. EC couldn't have competed with it even if you don't count the fact EC was a 2d fighter and VF was 3d. (Which also means they're different games.) I mean seriously it's not hard to find more instances of Sega insanity seriously shooting themselves in the foot. (32x just to name another.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Is it compatible with my old Virtual Boy game?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The wiser people at Microsoft and Sony are pissing themselves right now.
The 3DS is better in literally every stat than the PSP, even the PSPgo. Better graphics, better screen, bigger data files (2GB max at launch opposed to 1.8GB UMDs), better input (analog stick, dpad, AND touch), better everything.
Nintendo spent a time with weaker graphics to perfect a "gimmick", and once it became cheap to increase the graphics, did.
Meanwhile, on the "big boy stage", both of the other big 3 are busy trying to desperately imitate the "gimmick" of motion control that they spent the past few years mocking Nintendo for doing. Meanwhile, Nintendo's perfecting it.
It's cheap, from an IP standpoint, to add more graphical power. You don't really need to research it, for example.
And now, it's cheap from a hardware standpoint, too.
That 8 bit chiptune version of the Jaws Theme you hear is Nintendo, stalking Sony and Microsoft's lunch.
The Wii3D or whatever their next console is going to be is going to do the same thing the 3DS did to the PSP, to the PS3 and the 360. Take a gimmick they have perfected, perhaps add another gimmick, but increase the graphics and remove the one advantage the other two have.
Before some points it out. Sega never RELEASED a new Sonic game on the Saturn. The new Sonic game was Sonic X-treme and that was being done Sega Technical Institute in the US. At some point the game got into development hell and even got to the point where Yuji Naka threatened to quit because he thought Sega of Japan was helping STI by giving them some code from Yuji's game Nights. (Apparently it didn't actually happen but it's a WTF moment when one division is fighting with another because he doesn't want to help. Especially crazy since they had already done Yuji a favor when he didn't want to do Sonic on the Saturn and the palmed it off on another team.) Any more on that sonic thing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_extreme#Development_history
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Ok!? What's next on this earth haunted by lack of creativity? "WiiS", Nexus1S!?
But please Microsoft.. stay away from ZuneS!
I think the Wii was an eye-opener in how games could be pushed on a "casual" audience, but I think that the Wii was also a culmination of a trend that was already long in coming. By the time the Wii had come out, we'd had a number of people who were spending half the day playing cheap Popcap games like Bejeweled, or we had people who spent all day playing Monopoly on Yahoo Games, or we were starting to see people playing Uno on XBox Live or the smaller games on Steam, or you could throw in the renewed popularity of 2d platformers on the already successful Nintendo DS, or how about free downloadable copies of Nethack?
As you mentioned, there were a lot of people concerned that gaming was getting too big for its britches, that the cost of creating games was getting out of control. I wouldn't attribute the saving of the industry directly to the Wii because even the hardcore gamers were starting to think about smaller games by that point. The Wii expanded the industry with its gimmicks, but if the Wii had never existed, you still would have seen a lot of those people get caught up in Farmville a few years later.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
"it coped perfectly with the slight shifts and jerks you'd get on a morning commute."
How did it cope with the subsequent massive automobile accident ?
I really, really wanted a port of PalmOS (even one of the old monochrome ones) for my DS - a PDA that you can also play games on
Get a homebrew card for your DS or DS Lite and install DSOrganize and MoonShell.
They were willing to go CD. The Saturn was too but, as you noted, it was kinda doomed from the start (in addition to being complex, it was really designed as a 2D console, not a 3D one). Nintendo insisted on cartridges for anti-piracy reasons. Now carts do have the advantage of faster load times, but have massive disadvantages in the form of much, MUCH higher unit costs and less storage. Screwed over a lot of game makers who wanted to make more detailed titles (this is why Square stopped being Nintendo's guy). Sony was willing to go with CD, despite the fact it could be copied (the black CDs were just for looks, they'd read in a normal CD-ROM no problem) and gave devs what they wanted.
What's more? the Playstation came about from Sony being jerked around by Nintendo. Sony made the sound chip for the SNES and Sony and MS were working on a CD-based game unit. Nintendo told them to fuck off and did the N64 platform instead, Sony used their work as the basis for the PS1.
After all, Why have an Xbox or a PS3? Do they really think that people want to have a separate gaming console when you could hook up a computer to a tv?
PLAYSTATION 3 vs. home theater PC: The PS3 has a better selection of major-label couch multiplayer games. But the PC has a better web browser and a better selection of indie games, and OpenCL looks like it will eclipse Cell soon. So yes, I would hook an Eee Box, Aspire Revo, or Mac mini to an HDTV. The reason you haven't seen HTPCs before the past few years is that most PC apps other than games have required a high- or at least enhanced-definition display for the past couple decades, and mass-market HDTV is fairly new.
An extremely stupid design, that being the Cell. Not that there was necessarily anything wrong with the idea of a processors like that, but that the design was new, unproven, and unknown. You do not put a brand new, first gen architecture like that in a consumer product. IBM was using it for PCIe boards for research and toying with it in some servers, not going mass market with it. Also, you'll note, IBM decided that it was a failed experiment, they aren't going to continue development. Not the sort of thing to put in a consumer device.
However it gets worse. Sony had somehow talked themselves in to the fact that the Cell would be good enough for 3D graphics. Originally it was not to be the CPU, it was to be the GPU. I don't know if they just had really bad numbers or if they were willfully ignorant to the fact that GPUs did the kind of math graphics need way better than the Cell could (though the Cell is better at them than a normal CPU). Well, this became apparent and Sony did the stupid thing of making the Cell the CPU, rather than scrapping it for a PPC CPU.
Now they needed a graphics chip, so they went to nVidia. Problem was, they were late. It takes a long time to do design of hardware. The hardware that you see coming out today has been in the pipe for years, you can't just change it all at the last second. So what nVidia could offer them was a slightly modified version of their next gen computer chipset, the 7900 series. They couldn't do the full customization you want for a console in the time they had. As such the PS3 got a graphics chip not as suited for console use as it would have had they contracted it in the beginning. A major feature you can note in this regard is divided CPU/GPU RAM. You don't want that in a console since RAM is at a premium. When you've got only 512MB, you want it all unified. However nVidia couldn't redesign the RAM controller in the time provided so the PS3 has to operate as 256MB/256MB which means in many cases not as much RAM for high detail textures and so on.
It was just a poor series of design choices all around. In the end it was not only expensive, but hard to program for. Xbox 360 titles were being developed in Visual Studio, something developers have vast experience with and going from PC to 360 was almost as simple as clicking a cross compile button. The PS3 had poor tools and nobody understood how to use it. The Cell might have a lot of untapped power, but there was no knowledge base on how to program to access that.
That the production models will have a sim card slot? Seriously, if they can add multi tasking, and a semi-decent phone capability, I would ditch my phone for this.
The card now poses as Danny Phantom.
Nintendo can't block the card without blocking that game.
But possibly THQ and Viacom can. Even if the judge eventually rules in favor of the AceKard company, on the same basis as in Sega v. Accolade and Lexmark v. Static Control Components, legal fees can still bankrupt a company. And it still doesn't run DSi homebrew, only DS homebrew.
The PSP analog stick is way to small with movement so a better analog control is a great thing to hear about the 3DS. Not having a dual analog stick is a big mistake though. That is what hampered the PSP gameplay when converting FPV shooters(a long with the very small movement of the analog control on the PSP). Surprisingly this is where the iPhone and iPad work better with some practice getting used to not having tactile feedback of the analog controls. You develop muscle memory to know where your thumb and what amount/direction of movement it will create but you have dual analog control and you can even tweak the throw of those virtual analog controls to suite your preference. If PSP2 or 3DS had physical dual analog controls that would be one sweet setup. I honestly don't see how they could not add dual analog sticks in the year 2010. 1 analog stick is just not enough nowadays.
I mean you'd think since SoJ did loads of polygon titles in the arcade with top notch graphics that they'd do whatever they could to make transitioning them to the new home machine as easy as possible. Instead SoJ came up with the Saturn. (To be fair I still think VF2 and DoA look better than almost everything that ever came out on the PSX. Still, I heard it wasn't easy to get 3d games that looked that good on the system.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I have a lazy eye you insensitive clod!
"What kind of music do pirates listen to?" -Paul Maud'dib
"Yeeeaaarrrrr n' Bee!!" -Stilgar, Leader of Sietch Tabr
Mod parent up, informative
I'm just hoping they bring back WarioLand, Mario Clash, and other fun games from their last 3D device, the poorly-named and awkward-to-use Virtual Boy.
Haven't you noticed that Nintendo is trying to make the experience something that can't be duplicated easily on a computer emulator?
While the DS touchscreen can sorta be emulated by a mouse (you can do everything, but doing it while under time pressure is a bit hard in some games), the 3D effect is a lot harder to duplicate. Which makes it mostly emulator-proof for the moment (until we start getting 3D screens).
Handheld gaming -- Yer doin' it wrong.
Yeesh!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
someone from creating an r4 device that breaks the protections of the DS and allows for deliverable porn?
I sure won't call the Wii a failure, Nintendo has sold a lot of them and a good deal of accessories. However, they seem to have sold it mostly based on hype/shiny factor rather than legit use. I too know more than a few people who got a Wii, messed with it, and kinda set it aside. Seems they don't buy many games for it, don't use it much.
Nothing wrong with that from Nintendo's perspective (well ok, they'd like a higher attach rate for more money but still) they make money and all is well. However let's not pretend this is the One True Way(tm) for gaming. Been lots and lots of games coming out for consoles and computers that use game pads and keyboards and the like.
One problem with this... it has sterographic 3D and has tilt/gyro sensors... however, we won't be able to play games that make use of much tilting of the device, as that will screw up the "alignment" with our eyes and therefore screw up the 3D effect.
Where are the rants against closed and proprietary systems? Shouldn't there be posts extolling the yet-to-be-announced Android handheld gaming systems that are sure to come out and eliminate the gaming systems from Nintendo, Sony, etc? Where are the guys saying how they would never buy one, because they can build a better/cheaper one with a Reb Bull can form factor? Maybe these types of posts are just saved for products made by Apple.
the card was made in China
So is the Wii. Nintendo does enough business in China that it should know its way around the Chinese legal system.
and the design has been cloned and ripped-off by a bunch of smaller manufacturers.
Sue 'em all. Or does China not allow RIAA-style scattershot lawsuits?