There’s rarely occasion to think of the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, Phil Hartman’s “Saturday Night Live” character who won juries’ hearts by contrasting his bafflement at modern technology with his certainty that his client was innocent. If there ever was occasion to think of this Neanderthal, it’s the release of the Nintendo 3DS. If the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer was “distracted by the tiny people in this magic box” when seeing a TV, he’d break his fingers against the screen of the 3DS.
That’s because the 3DS employs a technology known as autostereoscopy, more simply known as “Oh my God, this is in 3-D but I’m not wearing those stupid glasses.”
You have to hold the 3DS steady, and at a certain distance from your eyes, but, in short, wow, it works.
| Nintendo 3DS |
| » Price: $249.99 |
When Nintendo announced this sequel of sorts to history’s most successful hand-held gaming device, I was worried it was just a reaction to fads in gaming and movies, as Nintendo’s previous foray into 3-D, the Virtual Boy headset, was a reaction to virtual reality.
And down that path the system might have gone, but for the grace of a little thing on the side of the system. That little thing is the 3-D slider, and lets you adjust, on the fly, how deep you want the effect, from none at all — yes, thankfully, all games can be presented in regular ol’ 2-D — to 20,000 leagues. As someone who’s always had trouble with 3-D — “Avatar” was a big headache for me, and not just because of the dialogue — I find it best to set the 3-D to the lowest level where it’s still activated. This way, I can enjoy what makes the system unique without reaching for the aspirin.
Nintendo, realizing that the sleeping giant of hand-held gaming is Apple, has preloaded a few “apps,” such as a Mii maker. The one that will make you want to take the 3DS on an immediate whistle-stop tour of your friends and family is the 3-D camera. Or cameras, I should say. Two cameras embedded in the outside of the device let you take pictures with parallax. You know how when you’re opening only one eye, you can see things behind foreground objects that you can’t see when using only your other eye? The side-by-side cameras reproduce this effect perfectly. This shouldn’t be a surprise — the illusion of parallax is what makes 3-D images look 3-D, after all — but it’s nonetheless amazing for a static image to look different depending on which eye you have open.
On the hardware side, the 3DS is a graphical powerhouse. Playing “Pilotwings Resort,” which reproduces “Wii Sports Resort’s” setting almost perfectly, makes you wonder how they fit a Wii inside this thing. The system also, finally, gets a joystick, which is larger and more comfortable than the PlayStation Portable’s. As a large-handed gamer, though, my one big gripe, no pun intended, is that Nintendo stuck with the tiny direction pad of the DS Lite, instead of the behemothic beauty embedded in the original DS. At least the joystick’s big.
