My Diary. By Chris Charlton, age 27 and a half.
Friday, February 25, 2011: DAY ZERO
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 8/10
Exciting times, exciting times. Tomorrow is the big day — the launch of the Nintendo 3DS. It's the first console I've actually pre-ordered to buy on day one since the PlayStation 2, which is more a damning indictment of my financial status at the time of other console launches (or testament to cooler heads prevailing) than anything else. As is always the case with hardware launches, the Internet shall explode tomorrow in a deluge of unboxing videos, pictures of midnight lines, and 'Is it good or is it crap?' so-called features.
This isn't quite one of those; it's a week-one diary designed to chronicle my first few days' thoughts and to give a broader impression than immediate pieces can convey. That and the Bic Camera store I have my preorder with doesn't open until 10 a.m. tomorrow, and I've work in the morning, so nyet. Will I maintain my high level of excitement for the device throughout the week? Will the buyer's remorse kick in by Wednesday? Read on!
In the meantime, quick turns on demo units have vindicated my decision to pick up Super Street Fighter 4 with the device. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask looks very pretty, but my barely functional Japanese isn't up to task. Famitsu, meanwhile, would have me get Nintendogs Plus Cats with the console after giving it the highest launch lineup score of 38/40, but then they gave genital warts 38 in their social disease round-up issue, so who knows.
Saturday, February 26, 2011: DAY ONE
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 10/10
6:00 a.m.
As I rapidly type before heading into work for the morning, I'm reminded of November 24, 2000 and the 17-year-old me picking up his U.K., day-one PlayStation 2 from Electronics Boutique (when it still was called that) in Cambridge. The shop had opened at midnight; I was there at half-past eight to pick the machine up before school. I asked the bleary-eyed assistant whether there'd been many people on hand at the dawning of this brave, new, video-gaming era. "Just a couple," came the drowsy and somewhat surly reply. Not the frenzied excitement of Oxford Circus then.
In a similar manner, the still large city of Fujisawa doesn't warrant the big launch day bustle of Yurakucho and Akihabara one hour away. Midnight would have been fun, but this is a more dignified affair.
7:00 p.m.
It's mine, all mine! After an agonizing wait behind a massive line of two, I picked up my hardware. Real-world commitments being in place (owing to Sod's law, 3DS has arrived on an annoyingly busy weekend for me), I elect to limit my first experiences to what's inside the big box.
What's inside the big box is a surprisingly weighty tome of a manual. Sod that. Except! Let's have a quick look at those hi-larious Nintendo health and safety diagrams first (see right).
Ah, Nintendo. It's good to be back in your mothering arms.
Booting up the system leads to a brief set up — the price we pay for our technologically advanced world of having to register absolutely everything and assign name tags to inanimate objects. My 3DS is now "Chris' 3DS" and rests on my super-duper Ikea table, Gavin.
A quick 3D test (left) and a hop, skip, and jump over network settings (I'm wired in my apartment and see no point to connect until May's shop-enabling firmware update, anyway) and things get underway.
There's a pleasing amount of stuff preloaded onto the firmware itself. The home screen is fairly slick and can be accessed at any time. At the top of the screen are icons to change the orientation of the main panes underneath (which will become necessary if you ever download anything) alongside some miniapps for looking at your friends list, writing memos, and using the Internet browser (though not until the firmware update hits). These are all accessible while keeping a game running in the background, but the "main" applications in Wii-esque channels underneath do not multitask.
Heading down the line of these and after the option to play the game currently inserted, there's your 3D camera. Self-explanatory stuff: two snaps and "that looks nice" remarks and on with the show.
Nintendo 3DS Sound is the onboard music player/visualizer. It's hard to see anyone using their 3DS as a music player, but you can if you want to while some little birdies fly around and chirp on the top screen. You can also use the mic to drop some rhymes while using the shoulder buttons to provide a beat if you so desire. Why you would is anyone's guess, but hey, maybe it's for, y'know, "the kids."
The Mii Studio is brilliant. Miis — and Xbox avatars for that matter — do play somewhat with my character-creation-loving mentality honed through years of wrestling games, but making a virtual you from a camera snapshot is quick and the sort of thing I can see inflicting on every friend I meet for the next month or so or until I've accumulated enough punches in the face. Such threats of physical violence did come from my girlfriend if I ever posted a quick Mii snap here, but you can judge the slightly dubious accuracy of the app with my ugly mug as a guide (left).
Not sure it's any more accurate than a roll of the dice, but one presumes that's not the point — the point being to harass friends, relatives, and random people; generate their Miis; and then laugh mercilessly at what ugly, ugly freaks they are.
The prelaunch commercials for 3DS here have been dreadful. Using the same template that Wii adverts have been using for years, celebrities play around with the thing while a disembodied voice asks what they think, and they mumble pleasantries. No gameplay footage…no attempt to make the device desirable. You'd think, though, that miles of cheesy footage could be made from Mii studio — and the same goes for the augmented reality (AR) games.
Perhaps it's a sign of Nintendo learning from tripe like Wii Play that the AR games collection is hosted on the device rather than provided at an extra charge. It makes the thirty minutes (and no more) you will spend with it a far more pleasant experience.
Not having messed much with augmented reality on the iPhone, putting the question-marked card on the table and seeing a dragon spring out of it to shoot at is kind of cool. When the table in front of the camera warps and stretches to create an island in a lava lake that you're required to shoot a boulder across in a billiards based distraction, it's hard not to emit an amused and impressed whimper.
Playing to its strengths as easy commercial B-roll fodder is the fact the player is made to walk around the card in the target-shooting game to see objectives. It is purely there to play once and never again (it won't take long to lose those cards, anyway — keep them sealed up and watch their value skyrocket on eBay. Or not), but it's fresh and fun. It's a shame that the character based cards do nothing but project characters on top for you to take pictures of…but hey.
Face Shooting, the Japanese version of Face Raiders, is similar "hard to forget, hard to want to do it again" material. The game takes a snapshot of your grinning visage and then sends those pictures wearing helicopter beanies zooming at you in 3D in a little on-rails shooter controlled with the gyroscope. It is patently and deliberately ridiculous. And for its five minute length, it's absolute hilarity, especially when failure involves you being given a big, wet, sloppy, lipstick kiss by yourself.
It's been a good first hour. While my first time with other hardware has involved feeling impressed, excited, and at times frustrated, 3DS is the first console I've played that wants — from the outset — to make you laugh.
Sunday, February 27, 2011: DAY TWO
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 9/10
Another busy day, so an hour with Super Street Fighter is all I'm going to grab. What's impressive is how feature rich the game is. It seems to have pretty much all of the content and modes from the console equivalent (arcade, online multiplayer, training, and trials — the latter being as difficult as I remember from the PlayStation 3 version of Street Fighter 4).
Plus, there's the added attraction of being able to collect figurines. Winning in single- or multi- (presumably) player garners you points you can spend to buy randomly chosen figures, which you then assemble into a team to fight on your behalf should you pass someone on the street in real life with the game. I'm at home right now, though, so on with arcade mode.
I'm not a fighting-game savant, but I start to see some issues with the 3DS at this point. It looks glorious — super moves in particular exploding off the screen — and apart from static rather than animated backgrounds, it has a good deal of parity with its console older brothers. Unfortunately, though, fighting games are not designed to be played with an analogue nub, and the D-pad kind of sucks on the 3DS. Spongy and with weak diagonals (a must for pulling off combos), it's not a deal breaker but a bit of a shame. That four special moves are mapped to the touch screen makes up for things, and the icons are big enough to jab at with a thumb rather than the stylus.
Speaking of big, the top screen has an impressive amount of real estate to it. It's more noticeable perhaps to me since I'm graduating from a DS Lite, but it makes the visuals all the more striking. Despite the slight control woes, this is still unmistakably Street Fighter, and this will be a good thing to many.
Monday, February 28, 2001: DAY THREE
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 8/10
Time to take the 3DS commuting, and given the bus and the train I have to take today, oddly, I'm spending more time with it now than on the weekend. I put the machine in sleep mode while I walk to the station and open it up to see I've walked one and a half thousand steps and been awarded ten shiny gold coins for my efforts. For all of Nintendo's reluctance to get into the meta-game market of achievement or trophy hunting, this is a very meta console. A channel on the home screen tracks what games you're playing and for how long each day and assigns them popularity rankings. Your steps are also measured; walk a bit with your machine and you get these play coins.
The play-coins concept is one of those things that I wasn't really sure of before the machine debuted, and I'm still not entirely sold. Not an allegory for achievements or trophies as I had assumed, play coins are rewards generated solely for walking around with the machine in sleep mode.
They can then be spent on in-game items or preloaded apps, the most appealing of which is the Mii adventure game, a simple role-playing game wherein coins are spent on sending warrior cats to save your imprisoned avatar. Bizarre, but progress unlocks extra outfits for your Mii, and there's also a jigsaw puzzle minigame where extra pieces are available for coins. Again, it's striking how much is actually tucked away in the hardware itself, and unlike the AR games, there's incentive to come back to this one. Alternatively, of course, there are more Street Fighter figurines to be had.
The coins are a very interesting tactic, though. It's unclear really what they aim to promote — is it an encouragement for gamers to get up and exercise? Or is it to encourage already active people to carry their device with them at all times? With street pass also encouraging you to move around with your machine switched on — swapping Miis, figurines, and data on the fly — it's an interesting take on social gaming…passively social, perhaps.
I'm playing Winning Eleven 3D Soccer today. I was interested in how looking at a 3D screen while being jostled about on a moving train or bus would affect my enjoyment or sense of balance or vision altogether. The train turns out fine, but a couple of times, a sudden stop on the bus means I have to blink and refocus on the screen. The game itself is enjoyable but unremarkable — Winning Eleven as it always has been but with a disarming amount of loading. It's not a huge deal, but five or six seconds to start a match is a shock when playing with cartridge media.
Using the sprint on the shoulder buttons reveals another hardware feature joining the D-pad in things that will likely be renovated in inevitable future hardware. That the top of the unit plays host to an infrared port, the charger port, the cartridge slot, and the little hole for your stylus means the shoulder buttons are pretty dinky (think Game Boy Advance SP, if you're familiar). It's not a deal breaker, but it fails to meet the ergonomic niceness of the analog slider, which is perfect for the tip of your thumb to sit in.
The battery starts to neatly give out as the train ride home reaches its destination — the hardware announcing its imminent coma with a flashing indicator light and home-screen logos spinning ever faster as they approach oblivion. I had at least two hours of play with 3D and Wi-Fi in effect, and it was in sleep mode the rest of the day. Not amazing battery life but not too bad.
Tuesday, March 1, 2001: DAY FOUR
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 7/10
Excitement at the new arrival is evolving into the 3DS being accepted into my gadgetry fold. I purchased a USB dongle for my PC to allow my computer to act as a router for the 3DS and let me connect online. As I thought, there's little to see or do as yet. Clicking the internet browser icon just brings up an error message while that's still forthcoming, which makes the connected 3DS experience seem like a turn-of-the-millennium website complete with "under construction" messages.
I'd heard about the friend-code rigmarole being made simpler on 3DS than the Wii, but with both parties still having to jot down and enter in a 12-digit number before they can become electronic buddies, it still manages to be a pain. That done, though, you can enjoy some online matches that seem largely lag free in Street Fighter with the same persistent battle-points system awarding you for wins as with the console versions. Hopefully, the same can be said for Winning Eleven, but it's hard to say as I couldn't find a game and don't know anyone else with it.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011: DAY FIVE
Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 3D/S
Opened the 3DS on the train today to find I had connected to someone via street pass for the first time. Hiroyuki's Mii appeared inside the little Mii RPG world and helped my gang of cats fight a ghost while I loaded Super Street Fighter 4 to find that my motley team of figurines had been demolished. It was a nice little smile raising occurrence, and I was pleased that at the end of my five-day blogging period, I could finally experience that final lauded feature of the hardware.
My purchase is not one that I'll be regretting. In terms of graphical clout, 3DS beats anything handheld at the moment, and the social internet aspects presented by street pass and the online connectivity are interesting and exciting.
Of course, the big asterisk by both of those statements leads to small print that reads "until the NGP comes out." Naturally, that means an exciting time for gamers — everyone loves a good fanboy war — but in the meantime, the 3DS is a piece of kit I can imagine loving for a long time…inevitable newer versions with improved 3D viewing angles, battery life, and buttons notwithstanding. The proof of the hardware is in the software, meanwhile, and the jury is out on that. Super Street Fighter 4 is impressive from the standpoint of being a big-console game squished onto a tiny card, but it isn't its own experience, whereas Pilotwings Resort may yet turn out to be. Winning Eleven, meanwhile, is overly familiar and underwhelming. As the hardware gains traction, and more specifically, 3DS-oriented material becomes widespread? Exciting times, exciting times.
Still on the fence? Questions? Opinions? Ask and opine below.