Nintendo has long defined the rules of childhood. In Nintendo’s world, logic and whimsy are intermixed and there is always a bigger boss and another castle. We learned from Nintendo that you can always turn your enemy’s weapons against them and that evolution is a fact. We learned that the best stories are played out in your head and even when you don’t have a lot of friends you at least always have Mario.
Nintendo also defined video gameplay. Their NES console, while seemingly underpowered, sat under millions of Christmas trees and at millions of birthday party tables for almost a decade. Their audience grew up, new members joined, and the SNES, Nintendo 64, GameCube, and Wii pushed the envelope ever so slightly with each generation. The Game Boy grew up too, morphing into the GBA, the DS, and now something else entirely.
The Nintendo 3DS isn’t hard to love. It’s a cute little handheld aimed at an interesting demographic. Because children under 7 shouldn’t use the 3D feature, it seems Nintendo has made this for tweens and, more important, early adopters in the 18-36 market.
Many of the devices’ unique features place it closer to a smartphone than a game console, and the new UI and home screen point to a richer experience outside of the game system. I worried, initially, that Nintendo was trying to do too much with these changes – and we’ll assess that later on – but in all it is a solid (if slightly flawed) device that will change the way you and your kids think about 3D.
Many of the devices’ unique features place it closer to a smartphone than a game console, and the new UI and home screen point to a richer experience outside of the game system. I worried, initially, that Nintendo was trying to do too much with these changes – and we’ll assess that later on – but in all it is a solid (if slightly flawed) device that will change the way you and your kids think about 3D.
What Is It?
The 3DS costs $250 in the United States and is currently sold out in Amazon pre-sales. It comes with a 2GB SD card, AR gaming cards, a stylus, a charging dock, and a power cable. It is available in black – really a sort of grey/black mix – and blue. IGN believes that the deviceis running two 266MHz ARM11 CPUs and a 133MHz GPU. It’s powerful enough to drive Nintendo-style graphics on the special screen, a deceptively demanding task as there are in fact twice as many pixels to render as it “looks” like.
