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Nintendo 3DS To Be Released In February/March
angry tapir writes "Nintendo's 3DS, the first portable game device with 3D graphic technology, will go on sale in Japan on Feb. 26 next year. The 3DS will cost ¥25,000 (US$298), Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's president, told a packed news conference in Chiba, Japan. It will launch in Europe, Australia and the US in March."
Nintendo also detailed a number of games that will launch at or near the same time, and they said the online shop would get some improvements
How many people will drop the estimated 300$ that is being possible?
The Virtual Boy was portable.
Also a friend of mine had a game that looked like a pair of binoculars far older than the Virtual Boy. It had a passive back light, meaning it was best played outside or under a lamp. It was from the late 70's or early 80's, it was akin to an LCD game though it was 3D.
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Who here wouldn't love to see this technology implemented on your next cell phone? With binocular sensors, you can now take (and display) 3D photos =) 3D Google Earth and Maps would be kinda cool too.
Life is not for the lazy.
I can see this going to $250 in the USA, but the price still seems high. Is this the first time that Nintendo has priced a portable higher than a console equivalent?
Of course, I suppose the term "equivalent" is a bit shakey. It's easy to draw a comparison between the DS and the N64, but not so much with the 3DS.
Three hundred dollars? I mean, yeah, I'm sure a good number of hardcore gamers will spring for it, but I can't imagine the masses are going to be too thrilled at that price point. Even if it ends up releasing at $249.99 in the States, that's still a big chunk of change for a handheld. That's the same price as the PSP was at launch, and... well, it wasn't exactly the resounding success that Nintendo is used to from its handheld systems. I'm sure they've done their market research and everything and decided that that was the correct price point, but it seems like a pretty ballsy move, especially for Nintendo.
Where are you?
All those who said that sterescopic 3d is inherently a bad thing, that it's not "real", that it's offensive to you somehow, are you going to say the same about this? Or is it great because it's nintendo?
Very hackable, very cheaply too (flash cards are a dime a dozen these days), there's an open source sdk called devkitpro that will handle all your dev needs also.
Limitations to consider though, the ds only has 4mb of ram, and it's 3d hardware is not too crash hot, it has no floating point units at all and does everything in 16-bit fixed point.
Been waiting for this upgrade for ages. This Tennis game is _terrible_.
FYI: The Wii, the DS, and the DS Lite were all released in the US first.
+0 Meh
Just waiting for Chris Hecker to say that this handheld is just three DSes duct-taped together.
Err, whoops, not the DS Lite.
+0 Meh
Despite my innate skepticism towards Nintendo, I'm fairly interested in the 3DS. It feels like we saw a big jump forward in handheld technology a few years ago, with the original DS and the PSP, but that we've not seen anything since then except for a succession of "lites" and other assorted rehashes (including the dismal PSP Go). The 3DS looks as though it should be capable of pushing the technical limits of handheld gaming beyond the PSP, so yes, I'm interested. The likely price-tag doesn't put me off too much. I can afford it, but it does likely mean that it won't get the kind of instant 8-15 playground mass-adoption that the GBA and DS had. If anything, that could be a good thing for me personally, if it means that early games may be more likely to appeal to grown-ups.
However, I do have a few misgivings that make me nervous about the whole thing.
First of all... region locking. Does the 3DS have it? Traditionally, handhelds have been region free, but Nintendo (who have always been the most draconian and least ethical in this respect) have already introduced elements of region locking into the DSi. One of the major uses I have for handhelds is passing the time on trips to the US. If there is widespread region locking on the 3DS, then I'm not interested.
Second... how usable will it be when used in a genuinely portable capacity. When I'm in the comfort of my own home, I'm more likely to want to play games on my PC or a full-sized console than a handheld. So a handheld needs to be properly usable on the move. This has always, for me, been the PSP's biggest advantage over the DS. Using the PSP on a train (or a bumpy flight) is not a problem. Using the DS stylus under those circumstances tends to be a mess. Throw 3D technology into the mix and I can imagine things getting "interesting". I'll be looking carefully at the early reviews to try to get a sense of this.
And third... what will the games lineup be like? Things look fairly promising here; the range of titles unveiled so far does not look bad for a launch line-up. And the precedent from the DS gives reasonable cause for optimism, with decent coverage of most genres. However, there's always that nagging doubt that stems from the fact that the last 3 "full sized" Nintendo consoles have all, within a year or two of launch, become the near-exclusive preserve of Nintendo first party titles (which vary wildly in quality and don't tend to be frequent releases) and low-quality "family" party games, with the occasional decent game that slips through vanishing into a pit of obscurity (yes, Eternal Darkness and Dead Space: Extraction, I'm looking at you). I'd imagine that a degree of support from the big Japanese developers like Square-Enix would be guaranteed, particularly with so many of them apparently struggling to keep up with the development costs of the full sized consoles, but I'd like to know which Western developers are interested.
No it doesn't.
Nor does it change the fact that the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476. Or that peanuts are technically legumes and not nuts.
But I don't get why you're bringing that up.
And I thought the PSP was expensive. How do they keep their prices so low and still make a profit?
I'd like to know if it has proper hibernation support. When you closed the screen, the current DS went into what could be best described as "sleep". Whilst it was quick to come out of, the battery life was shorter than when the device was off and if the power went, you lost everything before your last save.
Implementing a version of hibernate would increase the wake up time of the device - but in return mean that the battery life remains unaffected when it's off and even if the battery died, you could still charge it back up and be able to resume where you left off.
Of course, some people will suggest just charging it as soon as you get back home - but it penalises the casual gamer or someone (like me) that gets home and completely forgets.
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Support game devs, buy independent.
I just pooped your party.
Oh baby oh baby oh baby oh baby oh baby!
I want one!
Have you tried it?
In response to the multitude of comments referring to 3D as a gimmick, maybe you should take a step back and realize that pretty much everything about a video game is a "gimmick." Nothing about a video game serves a useful purpose. 3D presentation? gimmick, 2D worked fine. HD graphics? Gimmick, plenty of game showed that SD could give us pretty games.
Everything about video games is a gimmick. I think what you're aiming for is "I'm not interested in this." That's fine, but not a basis for a value judgment.
I will be purchasing this entirely to play the new Professor Layton game...now that looks awesome! I love those games on the DS and the trailer released for the 3DS one makes the purchase of the system worth it just for that.
after that 3-4 decent games per year which will be drowned in hundreds of shovelware games per year.
Just be glad it's a closed platform, unlike the semi-open iOS and Android platforms that have thousands of shovelware games per year.
... and I think AKAIO for the Acekard 2 is supposed to be open-source. Regardless it's one of the cheaper but high quality cards. The supercard developer has been awesome as far as upgrading his products goes aswell. I don't remember if it was the xtreme card or whatever it was named which was the most advanced one (back then atleast) but it ws much more expensive and they didn't let sites like deal-extremes sell it for the low price they had.
Very hackable, very cheaply too (flash cards are a dime a dozen these days)
Unless you live in a country whose customs department routinely confiscates game-console-specific flash cards at the border.
Can one make/install own games and stuff? If yes, is it hard?
Nintendo has an officially supported tool for end users to make their own DS games, but they're limited to 8 seconds long.
The Wii was released in the US first just so it could hit shelves before the Christmas shopping season (pretty much right after Thanksgiving in the US). As this is a Spring release, there's really no reason to push it out stateside first.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Support game devs, buy independent.
That'd be fine if Nintendo didn't do things like rejecting every game developed in a home office, such as Bob's Game. Which independent handheld gaming device do you recommend that U.S. residents buy instead of Nintendo products? I'd prefer one with a working directional pad because not all genres have been shown to work well with only touch input.
No, they can release anywhere first. However the DS is stagnating more in Japan than other territories so Japan needs a new system now, the West could live with just the DS for another year and will likely keep buying the DS long after the 3DS has come out (as happened with the GBA).
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Maybe they're not expecting people to see the instant benefit and instead are hoping for a gathering of momentum behind the device leading up to the next Christmas. Given the coverage Kinect and Move have had, it's not a bad idea if they think it will be a hard sell at launch to soft launch early for the following year.
iOS isn't a "semi-open" platform.
Like Microsoft's XNA Creators Club, Apple's iPhone developer program is semi-open in that anyone can purchase a devkit for $1,027 plus tax (Mac mini + iPod touch + first year of developer certificate) and submit applications. Nintendo, on the other hand, officially requires a dedicated office and a previous published title on another platform.
If it's full of shovelware crap, blame the quality assurance process of the famous walled garden.
Yes, I blame Apple for not providing its App Store customers with an effective way to sort the wheat from the chaff. But with Nintendo, everything developed by a team working from home offices is presumed to be chaff.
Unless you keep your head DIRECTLY aligned with the center of the screen you lose the 3D effect. Really annoying for what already is at best a mediocre 3D effect.
I had the same concern. However, I played one and what I found was that because you are holding it, keeping it in the sweet spot is much easier than expected. It was way better than the large barrier screens I had seen elsewhere for simply that reason. As for the 'mediocre 3d effect', I was surprised to find that it was easier to play whatever the flying game because of the depth cues.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
In general all new technology is a gimmick until someone finds a way to use if effectively.
3D will be a gimmick unless someone comes with a good design that exploit its potential. Similary to how the Wii controllers can feel "gimmicky" for a lot of games, except the (very few) ones in which their capabilities are used properly
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Second this. I am a DS homebrew developper... actually I have developped 2 apps which I use for myself but nevet got to "release" them. The first one is a simple translation dictionary (as I was coming to Germany, I needed a fast German - English translator) based on "grepping" a word from a dictionary text-file.
The second is a "port" of the dual n-back game (similar to BrainWorkshop)... this one I am just refining the first version and I hope to release it (GPLv2) soon-ish (work does not let me spend all the time I wish on that).
But I can confirm that devkitARM + ndslib are really nice to work in to program for the DS. Of course you need to know C or C++.
Nevertheless I wonder how easy will it be to brew for the 3DS, given that some homebrew made for the DS does not work on the DSi /XL. Given the new architecture of the DS, we may need to wait a couple of years until teh-leet-hackers release an amazing library similar to ndslib for the 3DS...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Every time Nintendo attempts to drive forward with a new implementation a whole big group of people dog-pile into the room trying to be the first to shout 'gimmick!' They shouldn't be taken seriously as they don't even engage their brains yet before posting their criticism. Here are a few non-verbatim quotes of I've seen before:
- "The DS's use of a stylus is a gimmick. They should do something non-gimmicky like building in an eye-tracker."
- "Nobody can use two screens at once."
- "Well, it looks like Nintendo invented the 'remote control!'. Sony had one years ago!" .....(This was written before the dippy found out about the motion controls.)
- "Can you say: Virtual Boy? Bet the Virtual Boy 2 will be as much of a failure as the original. It was difficult to use and gave people headaches." ......(This is actually in this thread.)
- "Nintendo is doomed. Their business prospects look dismal because Sony created the Move controller."
Sometimes I think Nintendo harvests energy from people shouting 'gimmick' and uses it to power their R&D division.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Re-releasing old gameboy games is pretty useless now. Not only has the entire gameboy catalog (at the very least, 99.9% of it) been released online, but you can download/rip and play them all with little fuss on an emulator with almost 100% accuracy to the original experience. Heck, even there were Gameboy emulators for the DS! Not only that, but they're only offering old GB games, no Gameboy Advance games? What a rip-off; not only will the games be tainted with DRM, but the product and effort to make it is so immensely small that GBA games could have been easily supported.
I'll stick to backing up my own games here. All of the emulators on the Wii/DS that are homebrew compared to Nintendo's official solutions have so many more features than Nintendo does: save states, no DRM, WAY better controller support, customizable controls, speed-up/slow-down modes, etc. If you really think you can compete with free here, you're hugely mistaken, Nintendo, unless you make a better effort. ...That all isn't to say that I'd never get a 3DS; it looks awesome! With that said, however, it's only worth that price if I can use a flashcart on it to run my own backups/homebrew ;)
"Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded." -Archbishop Fulton Sheen
people don't remember it's a gimmick. Take the extreme amounts of blood in Mortal Kombat. That was *extremely* gimmicky when it came out. It's just people were too busy thinking 'Whoaaaa bloood' or 'Omg video games should be banned!'
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Nevertheless I wonder how easy will it be to brew for the 3DS, given that some homebrew made for the DS does not work on the DSi /XL. Given the new architecture of the DS, we may need to wait a couple of years until teh-leet-hackers release an amazing library similar to ndslib for the 3DS...
Depends, a lot of ndslib (at least in 2005-6'ish when I last used it) is just memory mapped registers in #defines and light wrappers for them. Hard part is reverse engineering the hardware design and bypassing the security mechanisms, after that the sdk is just a matter of sitting down and writing it.
Well like Metal Gear it won't be a launch game, and i don't know if it's the type of RPG you care about or not, but Class of Heroes is getting ported to 3DS.
As well as being an interesting (albeit divisive) RPG itself, the indication that PSP games will be getting ported to 3DS in general is very good news. I'm hoping to see a port of Jeanne d'Arc myself, and maybe the re-translated FF Tactics.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Depends, a lot of ndslib (at least in 2005-6'ish when I last used it) is just memory mapped registers in #defines and light wrappers for them. Hard part is reverse engineering the hardware design and bypassing the security mechanisms, after that the sdk is just a matter of sitting down and writing it.
Talk about underestimating complexity.
It took *years* for the homebrew community to get a decent wifi library for the NDS, as the only real way to write one was to poke registers and see what happened. Really, the only reason the DS video hardware was so easy to reverse-engineer is because:
a) much of the 2D subsystem carried over from the GBA, and
b) the 3D support is fairly simplistic.
The 3DS, OTOH, is likely to be a much more complicated piece of hardware, with a much more powerful 3D pipeline. I strongly suspect it'll take a lot more than just "sitting down and writing it" to reverse-engineer how it works.
Agreed for most part. However the reverse-engineering of the DS was not done as in the dark as you mention. After all, as you said, the DS had a very similar hardware as the GBA. In addition hardware was mainly an ARM processor for which there *is* documentation. That's why you see a lot of reversee engineering is done using IDA and the like.
I think the most important factor for the complexity of the 3DS will be in the nature of the 3D hardware, which is a propertary processor from a startup (Pica200) from which we may not have a lot of technical information.
Now, regarding what GP said of how "trivial" it is to write the SDK, it seems he does not have a clue what he is talking about. You just have to see projects like PALib which *tried* to create an alternative more "user friendly" DS library (has been discontinued).
Designing and writing a good interface library, even if at the core it is just a definition of memory address access (e.g., GBA memory-mapped registers) takes a hell of a lot of effort and time. Specially if what you want to achieve is a library which "lazy" developpers like myself can use.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I wouldn't be too surprised; it's at least a renewable energy source. ;)
In all seriousness, I think they might actually do something similar -- Nintendo has long focused on gaining and maintaining a lead in the industry by being disruptive, and seeing how many people are upset can be one way of gauging how disruptive you're being. This fellow has written quite a bit about Nintendo's disruptive strategies, and most of what I've read sounds spot-on.
I'd recommend Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy for starters. The article is long, but worth the read.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It took *years* for the homebrew community to get a decent wifi library for the NDS
Of course since most existing tcp/ip stacks assume some kind of kernel, and writing an embedded one on such limited hardware takes time and skill. However was homebrew functional before the SDL and wifi libraries? yes. Low level access only is still decent enough for homebrew by my standards, ds was the first machine I wrote arm assembly for.
I strongly suspect it'll take a lot more than just "sitting down and writing it" to reverse-engineer how it works.
I already said that that would be the hard and painful part, what I said was once the hardware is properly understood writing the libraries for interaction with the hardware isn't so bad. As with most things the spec is the harder part.
Worst case scenario you're analyzing data logs from a logic analyzer wire wrapped to the board examining what real games do and how it effects things, long and painful but far from impossible.
High level libraries are a nicety not a necessity for homebrew, at least in my opinion, and you have to admit exposing memory mapped registers with a consistent naming scheme in a library once the specs are known (the hard part) is a hell of a lot easier than what PAlib was trying to achieve by making something more typical developer friendly, or other higher level libraries like the wifi library.
Once the hardware is exposed and functions are known, people are able to write their own code for it and experiment/write software even if the high level libraries aren't there to abstract everything away.
High level libraries are a nicety not a necessity for homebrew, at least in my opinion,
The same thing can apply to standard PCs and the "nicety" of using C plus stdlib/C++ STL or even Java instead of pure assembly.
Of course it is quite "straightforward" to program in the DS once you know the structure memory-mapped registers, however you will see very few complex homebrew is developped from there.
For an example look at the Wii homebrew and Grrlib or libwiigui (the explotion in the number of homebrew apps after they were released was amazing), as I said in my previous post, there are a lot of "lazy" programmers such as myself who want to program for these consoles but are lazy to look work at the memory-mapped register level.
For example, I would not be doing the dual-nback game I am doing for the DS would if I needed to spend to much time dealing with the memory mapping. Thanks to the very good quality libraries are available I could use them to sit down one sunday while my wife was away and hack together a first version of the program.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Why would you buy the DS Lite when the DS Phat was a waste of money that you didn't ever play with? Did you really think the games would change with the Lite? Fool you once shame on them, fool you twice...
I was very interested in the 3DS when it was announced, but I'm not going to pay the early adopter tax on this one. Sure I might pick up a few interesting games if they look like they won't last long on store shelves (Konami's notorious for limiting Castlevania runs for example), but I won't pick up the system until it's in the $150 - $180 range. The cost of the screen will go down after the first year and that alone will drive the system price down. I'm not paying PS3/360 prices for this system, sorry Nintendo.
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