Nintendo 3DS: an exclusive hands-on preview

Last weekend I bagged tickets to an exclusive Nintendo 3DS hands-on preview – and first impressions were excellent! After a vague demonstration of StreetPass, “real-life” demonstrations of Street Fighter and Resident Evil, and a brief introductory video featuring Jonathan Ross (seemingly the new face of Nintendo Europe), I got my hands on the 3DS.

First off, the main selling point, the screen: it works brilliantly! As soon as I picked up the 3DS I was seeing the full effect of the 3D – it worked straight from the off. The effect was fantastic, especially considering the fact that it was glasses-free and instant. While not all the games I played made great use of the 3D, those that did (Kid Icarus: Uprising springs to mind) looked excellent, with enemies zooming in from the distance and text coming out of the screen at you. However, the 3D effect only works in certain ‘sweet spots’. You can tilt the screen as much as you like towards and away from you with no consequence, but twisting the device from side to side removes the 3D effect until you hit another sweet spot.

The rest of the hardware also worked well – the analog pad felt good under the thumb, gliding easily with the games responding accordingly. The dual camera system on the outside of the system produced great 3D photos, however when using the screen as a viewfinder the image looked a little blurry and some of the objects’ depths looked a little off. Luckily, the software then seemed to perform some sort of rendering process that resulted in a realistic 3D image.

I managed to play a good selection of games across the two sessions, from a range of developers. Ocarina of Time and Kid Icarus both looked great and played really well. Also on display was the fantastic Augmented Reality card system which was great fun, spawning giant crystal snakes out of the surface you place the card on, and FaceRaiders, a quirky but fun game that made good use of the 3D cameras and facial recognition technology. From third party developers, Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time was just a pretty standard platformer, while Super Monkey Ball made good use of the available motion sensors with some minor control issues.

Overall, the 3DS is looking like it’ll be a great console, and a huge hit too. Forget the (arrogantly named) “Next Generation Portable”, this is the handheld to have.

The Nintendo 3DS will be released on March 25, 2011 in the United Kingdom and Europe.