Garret writes a 3DS article so I don’t have to.

Garret: Alright, jerks, I’ve played this 3DS business and it’s both amazing and then also confusingly odd(?). I don’t know what the best word would be. Amazing: The screen. When you hit the “sweet spot” (more on that in a second), it’s sooo great. I played a demo of Pilotwings Resort and it was fantastic. The top screen is so crisp and the graphics are easily superior to PSP (but Wii/360/etc? mmmm no. Not with these games at this moment). There was flying-through-rings plane demo and a jetpack demo. They were both really great. The interesting thing about Pilotwings is that I ended up forgetting to focus on the 3D and just played the demo, and I like that. The effect is definitely there, but it’s not so glaring that it’s omnipresent above all else. With that said, though, when you turn the slider to “off,” you literally think “what the fuck is this shit?” It definitely adds enough to make you miss it, even if you don’t pay attention to it the entire time.

Other games that I played/watched ranged from good to bad.

Good:

Animal Crossing – This was only a video, but for everything they showed it’s just Animal Crossing; nothing “new” but the 3Dness of it. BUT, it was interesting to watch. The added depth (and possibly not having played AC in a few years) made me want to play the game.

Metal Gear Solid – I only got to see this for just a couple of seconds because they kicked me off, but it was really sharp. I really want a sweet ass 3D Metal Gear. It was basically shots of the jungle ala MGS 3, and they were great. The bottom screen told me to “enjoy the video,” so I did.

Mediocre demos:

FaceBall (I made this name up) – Here you took a picture of your face, then the console mapped it around a head, and then your face tries to fly towards you to kiss you. To make sure you don’t get kissed by yourself, you have to tilt and move the whole 3DS around to aim. The background is the WORLD AROUND YOU thanks to the two cameras on the back of the 3DS. I was spinning around, not intentionally aiming at the breasts of some booth babe, shooting my own face. Finally, an excuse to point cameras at breasts. Thanks Nintendo.

Nintendogs & Cats! – No cats available. The booth babe and I had a nice conversation about how cats will just lay around and hate your guts, but I want to know what cats really are all about in the game. Other than that, you’ve got the gist. I threw a boomerang at a beagle.

Taking Regular Pictures – And you can also take pictures! On the one hand, I was really impressed. The booth babe did a still punch towards the camera and I captured her in THREE DEEE! There was a meter on the bottom screen for you to make it more or less 3D (additional to the slider on the physical slider). It looked really great. BUT, here’s the BUT: When Travis came up to look at my picture and I tried to show him, I had no way of knowing if he could see it correctly. There’s no good “looking over your shoulder” area. Well, there MIGHT be, but you don’t know if they are seeing it well if they don’t tell you.

And that right now is the only big problem: whereas the DS XL is all about “hey pals, come look at this!” (in addition to “Holy shit this thing is like holding a TV!”), the 3DS is all about YOU, just YOU. YOU get to see it and no one else unless they take the console from you. Of course, you can pass it to your buddy, but then you have no idea what’s going on. From one perspective (and for those pictures you can take), it’s kind of aggravating. But realistically I have people look at my DS screen about .5% of the time, so I don’t think it’d be a huge issue after all your friends have seen it a couple of times.

I still plan on buying one as soon as I can. I’m thoroughly excited, and I keep wanting to play with it more, but it’s not without it’s faults.

Travis: Probably my favorite moment in that booth was hearing Garret ask one of the booth attendants “Okay, so these are the regular pictures?” because there were various 3DS stations demoing different features and he wanted to find where to test the 3D picture taking method. But the lady said, “Well they’re not regular!” as if she were actually offended. They allow you to take 3D pictures and she had to let him know it. This just led to some confusion because he meant, “So I can take pictures here that don’t lead to me wrapping my head around a globe and launching it into space, right?”