Bow down to the killer app, ye dogs! Bow!

[the_antithesis]

So, what happened?

After three years of bitching about the 3DS I now own one. Why? Because I tried Luigi's Mansion in the store and found it charming enough to actually shell out for it like a twat. Mind you, it's currently having a little sleep as it drained a few minutes after I got it home because fuck you. I also couldn't get the wi-fi to work with it, so I'm not posting here from it, which would have been aces, wouldn't it?

I got the XL model because I'm done with eyestrain-o vision. Which is a hilarious thing to say since the screen is still eyestrain-tastic despite its size. It's also heavy as fuck. Which is a feature you look for in a portable gaming system. But otherwise it looks nice and shit, I guess.

I spent a little time fiddling with the AR shit and... Interesting tech demo is all you can say about it. I found the camera to be rather grainy and unimpressive and the actual gameplay is hampered by the machine being finicky about keeping the card in view at all times. For a game that forces you to move around and shit, that's a rather annoying to have the game suddenly stop because the game can't recognize the rest of the surroundings. I looked up online and it doesn't seem that too many games use this for any fucking thing, which is a shame. The Kid Icarus cards allows for one-on-one battles between the characters on the cards, but the fights are completely automatic. The player does nothing. This is a sad underuse of what is potentially an interesting technology.

As for the 3D... yeah. I'm on record for not liking stereoscopic 3D because it sucks. The 3DS is no better, really. The 3D doesn't seem to be all that much of a much. Shit doesn't seem to be popping out of the screen. So the effect is shallow. Like one of those paper dioramas.



Yeah. Like that. Only flatter.

The sad thing is shutting off the 3D doesn't appear to improve the quality significantly. It may be that Luigi's Mansion was originally a Wii or WiiU title but got ported to the 3DS later in development. There appears to be some scaling artifacts her and there that really fuck up the image quality. If that's not the case, then it really puzzles me.

Another strike against the 3D is that the unit has motion controls of some kind. If I had noticed this was key to gameplay when playing the demo, I probably would have left it in the shop. but the 3D requires you to hold the unit and your head rock steady at a specific angle while motion controls require you to waggle the unit around. I would complain that this fucks up the 3D, but to be honest it fucks up normal viewing, too as the screen is built into the unit and all.

I still try using the 3D because lame shit like this is right up my alley. ...

Fuck. Does that mean I'm a hipster?

Shit.

But I wind up shutting off the 3D much of the time and, honestly, it really doesn't add or subtract in any way. It's just kind of there. Maybe Luigi's Mansion doesn't make the most of the 3D, but I found when it wasn't being fiddly or giving me double vision, it wasn't doing much of anything at all. Turning it on to turning it off, it was hard to tell what the 3D actually did most of the time. Other times it fucked up and then it was pretty noticeable. For a small percentage of the time, it worked as intended and accomplished nothing. I guess some games, like one of the Mario ones uses the 3D because without it, you can't even see the platforms.

Overall, the main point here is I bought a game system because it had a game on it I decided I wanted to play. This is how game systems work. That's it. That's all. Nothing else.

[missingnocchi]

I played a friend's 3DS for a few hours one time, and I found that the 3D quality varied greatly between games. I played the Ocarina remake, one of those Lego games, and some generic puzzle game. Ocarina's 3D was done quite well, I thought, but it might have been that the other two were so barely noticeable that it seemed good by comparison.

[Jmpty]

My kids dig all the Marios stuff on the 3ds xl, but my oldest is 9. Just sayin'

[the_antithesis]

I'll tell you what, though. I'm already a bit disappointed in either the system or the programing. Not sure which. I've noticed sometimes objects turn invisible. This is confusing seeing as it's a ghost game and one mechanics is sometimes the ghosts can turn things invisible. But this is not the case with the objects I've noticed. The game just didn't render them, is all. I'd let it slide but since disappearing objects is a game feature and it's happened more than just once in less than a day, that's just poor programing or something.