General notes on the event -
Really nicely organised. We were led into the room with the 'history of handhelds' display, and welcomed to the event. They explained the thinking behind the touch sensitive floor projection -- it represents the always interconnected nature of 3DS systems using Streetpass. The Street Fighter and Resident Evil show-pieces were fun, everyone passing through those rooms wore a giggling, shit-eating grin. We were led upstairs to watch a promo reel of games, and a video of Jonathan Ross bigging the system up, and then into the game rooms. The girls attending the systems were really well drilled on the games and the system; they ushered me into trying one or two games I might not have otherwise tried. I'll go into the games more below. They had a nice blogging area on the top floor, where you could immediately plug your SD card into a nice white MSX netbook or use the WiFi. They also had HMV trying to take pre-orders... £219. Heard more than a few people say that Tesco and Amazon were offering the best prices!
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THE SYSTEM
I can't fault the aesthetics of the system, it feels really nice. I was concerned about the d-pad, I thought it might have been uncomfortable to use, I thought that third parties would chronically under-use it in favour of the circle-pad -- I'm glad to say, that doesn't seem to be the case. The Select, Home and Start buttons are flush with the screen, which means they're not as tactile and easy to find as other buttons - but that's probably a good thing -- you won't be accidentally pressing them.
The 3D Screen is just awesome. When you first play with it, you'll toy with the slider trying to find your ideal position. What the slider appears to do is move the two parallax barrier images further apart from one another -- so the way I conceptualised tweaking it was by thinking: I need to line each image up with each eye. And I reckon that's a sure-fire calibration technique. Depending on how far you hold the system away from your face, and how far apart your actual eyes are, the ideal slider position will vary... but if you're worried about this at all, don't. It's really easy to find your sweet spot.
I had a go of the 3DS Camera, and played around with a few photos, adding stamps, drawing on them and using the extrude tool - that was nice. I would be interested to find out how the system stores these pictures on the SD card. The low resolution of the 3D camera and the internal camera is a bit of a bummer, but seeing as you'll only be viewing 3D photos on a 3DS, it's not gonna matter too much for that. The Mii Creator using the camera function is really nice, I don't have a lot to say about it -- it works. I had a look at the Nintendo 3DS Sound app, but there were no sounds on the system to play with. I tried to load the web browser, but a message popped up saying it would be available later. It was the same thing with the Friends-List icon. The notifications icon brings up a sub-menu for different kinds of notifications -- I feel no more educated on how notifications will actually work...
What I thought was really cool was the way the system suspends games and applications when you press the home button. The home menu appears on the touch screen, and just above it (on the 3D screen) - the game or app you were just playing dims, blurs and dips into the background. Whatever option you're highlighting in the menu is then represented on top of the background process in 3D. Its a little visual flourish that I hadn't appreciated from screenshots of the system menu, it looks really good.
The systems used at these events were not using the final software, and I was told that there was a command you could trigger with a combination of certain buttons at the home menu that would wipe the firmware. So as the day went on I noticed some cheeky buggers had been doing just that to one or two systems. I was also told that at the London event, someone had tried to steal a game card / get the cables off the back, and made off with an SD card. Tsk tsk! Now for some game impressions:
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PLAYABLE DEMOS
Resident Evil Mercenaries -
This was the first game I played. I expected to really love this but to be honest, I didn't. The models and general visuals are great, but they're so good, that in a way - the 3D effect seems less obvious. Having said that, the RE4 village level feels a bit uninspired and at odds with the RE5 style protagonists. For some reason, despite playing Nintendo consoles all my life, whenever the game said "Press Y to pickup" I kept pressing X... it just seemed wrong. It took me a minute or so to get accustomed to the controls, and I think they could be done better. I couldn't find a customisation menu to turn off reverse-Y-axis either. I was a little underwhelmed... this is right off my radar now, but I can't wait to play a fully fledged RE game on this thing. I can't wait for Revelations.
Pro Evolution Soccer
Directly after playing RE:M, I was ushered on to try Pro Evolution Soccer. This was a genuinely nice surprise. The depth is really obvious, even with characters quite distant from the camera. With the camera following play and being dynamic in dead ball situations, it looks awesome. At the final whistle when you get all the close-ups of players etc - it looks even better. It plays like old Pro Evo, there's not a lot to say about the gameplay: it's good. I would buy this.
Street Fighter IV
What I was immediately struck by was the nice menus. Each of the menu screens has a nice, layered, fine-tuned 3D effect. I started up a game using the dynamic camera, and played two games - as both Ryu and Ken. I'm not a huge SF fan, so I just picked the characters that I know actual moves for. I tried turning the 3D slider down to see if that hampered my play in Dynamic Camera mode, and to some extent it did -- it certainly wasn't as awesome to look at. With the slider on, it just looks really good. I had trouble pulling off a couple of moves using the slide pad, but its really easy to just drop your thumb to the dpad if you need to. I find the touch screen special moves and combos to be a bit of a cheat, but from what I understand - competitive games can be arranged to block that facility. This isn't one I'm thinking of buying, but it looks really good, and I imagine SF fans will love it. It could be the definitive version!
Dead or Alive Dimensions
I'm not a DoA veteran either. I seemed to walk through about 4/5 fights just by button mashing and trying Tekken style grabs... It feels as though the smooth Xbox-like aesthetic of the character models and backgrounds really makes the 3D pop. It looks awesome. I played a stage on a ship's deck, knocking my opponent down to a lower storage deck, and as my character followed I actually smirked and let out an audible "cool!"... again, I'm not particularly a fan of this series, so I can't speak too much about gameplay, but it seemed solid enough and it looked great.
Ridge Racer
Having seen the screens for this game, and finding the general mood towards the game unfavourable online - this isn't a game I was actually planning on playing. Never the less, I gave it a go. Like Street Fighter, there's a nice 3D effect to the menus. I took a moment to look at different cars on the vehicle selection screen, and although I think some of the models are pretty poor considering what this system can do, it was fairly nice to pan and zoom around them before starting a race. The loading screen between menus and race is noticeably lengthy, but it wasn't long enough to make me think "this is totally unacceptable". It was just within tolerance. Once I got racing, I actually said to the attendant booth girl -- this looks way better in motion than it does in screens. Don't get me wrong, in 2D it would still look like a PSP game, possibly worse, but the smooth framerate, the light trails coming off the break lights, and the 3D effect give it a nice, appreciable boost. Whereas I was fumbling around on Resident Evil to try and figure out the controls, I got the hang of this really quickly -- I was almost intuitively tailing cars, drifting around corners with subtle tweaks of the circle pad, and taking drift off early to overtake. The circle pad controls cannot be faulted. I think that people may be writing this game off based on screens, and may want to actually try it before judging.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
I picked this demo up as someone else had left it. Link inside a house in Kokiri Forest. This would have been a house with a static camera and pre-rendered background in the original game, but now it was full 3D, with lovely detailed textures and a camera positioned as such that when you moved to the center of the room, Link was front and center contrasting nicely in 3D space with the background. Cool, but not wowing, so I left the house. Immediately I had floating embers and fairy particle effects flying around the open spaces of Kokiri forest, in 3D at all sorts of different depths -- games with weather effects like Snow might look really fucking cool on this thing. There's an appreciable update to the visuals, I pottered around picking up stones and hacking grass, before heading off towards the Great Deku tree. Once inside, I scaled the outer walls to the first vine trail that has all the skullutas crawling all over it... I whipped out the slingshot and gave the gyro controls a try. Its okay, but you can quickly lose the 3D effect if you're not moving your head / eyeline along with the system. What seemed to work better is using the circle pad to aim generally towards your target, and then fine tuning the aiming with a bit of gyro control. I think the bow & arrows should be quite fun and accurate controlled this way, especially on the back of Epona. I opened a few chests to trigger a few different camera changes, and the 3D looks especially good there. The text boxes that appear for dialogue and in-game messages sort of float over the gameplay, and much like the menus in Street Fighter, Ridge Racer and other games it looks really nice. I didn't want to hog Zelda as others were, so I left the demo there and moved on. I've played it so many times, but it feels new enough as an experience. Day one for me.
Pilotwings Resort
The only modes I tried in Pilotwings were the plane and the jetpack. With the Wuhu Island settings I had some concerns that maybe they were just shoe-horning the Pilotwings name into a game that might not play like Pilotwings of old... the plane course put me at rest pretty quickly. Nice sense of control, one of the face buttons makes you accelerate, and the other slows you down -- there are orbs in the sky showing your ideal path. Every so often variants of these orbs will expand to become rings that you can fly through for added points. So you follow the trail around the island, and eventually you have to come in to land. Just like the SNES classic, you have to get your angles and speed right or you'll wipe out. Much the same story with the Jet Pack, it controls in a very familiar way, and you are given on screen notifications of landmarks to fly to, when you get there you fly through floating characters to trigger the next target etc. Visually, it looks great albeit simple; it's basically the same charming aesthetic as Wii Sports Resort, but if anything, with nicer visual effects -- in particular I noticed some lovely sunshine effects in the sky and reflected off the water. I only played the game in Bronze mode, and if I have any reservations or question marks about this game, it would be the longevity of it. Does the challenge ramp up enough in the harder modes? I don't know. Is the game full of challenges and unlockables? I don't know. If it hits the right balance on those things, this could be an amazing game and a must buy -- but until I hear more about the full game in reviews, I don't think I'll be committing to buy just yet.
Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time
I toyed with the 3D effect a lot in this one, and because its 2.5, layered sequentially into the background, I found I couldn't really tell I was changing the effect unless I actually moved the character and got the background layers moving. It looks good enough for a platformer of this ilk, but from what I played it didn't feel particularly challenging. Granted, it was just a demo. The controls are responsive enough. I just didn't come away feeling I knew enough about the game to comment any further.
Super Monkey Ball
I would have liked to have tried Monkey Fight and one or two other modes, but as I was feeling pushed for time I just tried the classic mode. My experience with gyro aiming in Zelda told me to not even bother trying the Gyro controls. I would consider using them in 2D mode, but I wouldn't use them in 3D. With slide controls, it controls really nicely and it looks good enough for a Monkey Ball game. As with the Rabbids demo, challenge was an issue with this demo, as it was sorely lacking. I got bored of picking up 100% bananas and reaching goals with ease and moved onto the next demo. I'm sure the full game will have a challenge or two though.
Face Raiders
I'd read about this and was really looking forward to it, but I really didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. The attending Nintendo girl offered to take my picture to start the game off, and she handed me the system back once she had done so. The bulging and contorting animation as it morphs your photo into an enemy combatant is absolutely hilarious. The game picks out the actual features on your face too, so it animates expressions you never even pulled, animates your mouth, your cheeks / eyebrows etc... it just looks funny as hell. The game starts to spawn multitudes of your evil alter egos, and you have to stand there moving the system around to shoot them down. There are floating mines that you can ricochet into enemies too. Every so often a piece of the background shatters forth, leaving a hole in reality, behind which you can see some kind of sub-space. As these holes appear, reality's rubble flies towards you and you have to shoot that down too. As you move the system around to aim, the holes that have appeared stay relative to your position no matter how much you move -- it's not perfect, but it's close. The gyro tracking must be nice and sensitive. As you continue to do battle with your alter egos, the game starts to pick up 'rescued faces' from the background... I don't know how these effect the gameplay. After killing a sufficient number of enemies, an even bigger version of you appears as a final boss. He wears a visor to protect himself from your shots, and has weak points on his face, as is the classic trope of Nintendo boss battles. I was very very impressed with Face Raiders. Its simple, really simple, but it had me smiling and laughing the entire time. I'm sure the novelty wears off after a while, but this is one of the things they should be showcasing in stores.
AR Games
This was another one I was really looking forward to. You start by pointing the system at a card and it spawns a little yellow box with a little creature inside. You shoot the box to knock it over and *poof* - it disappears and is replaced by six identical boxes, which open one at a time - whack a mole style. After beating this challenge, various geometry appears in place of the AR Card, and amongst it all lie little target boards. Some of them are at odd angles so you have to actually move around the card to shoot them all. The second instance of this challenge looked really good, as it made it appear as though there was a hole in the table... I shot all of the targets, and confounded as to why the game hadn't moved on yet, peered right over the card and into the 'fake hole' in the table to find the final target. Nice! After this a dragon in a sort of Jack-in-the-box setup appears, and springs towards the camera... I let out an audible "woa" at this point and the booth girl said that was pretty much everybody's reaction at that point. You have to shoot the segments of the dragon to defeat it, and he tries to fire fireballs at you and reach towards you to claw at you. If you're close enough to either attack, you'll take damage -- you can avert these attacks by moving back or moving around the dragon. To hit some of his segments, you will need to move around him actually. Again, another really impressive demo, and exactly the kind of thing I think they should showcase.
Games I didn't play but that my friends did
Unfortunately, I never got to try Kid Icarus. My mate Andy said it was pretty good though. He was a bit confused by the controls, especially as they changed so drastically from flight-section to on-foot section, but overall he thought it looked good and played well. I didn't get a chance to play Steel Diver, and I skipped Asphalt 3D - so I don't know how that compares to Ridge Racer. There are probably other games that I'm forgetting here...
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NON-PLAYABLE DEMOS
As well as the games mentioned above, there were non-playable demo reels. I thought the Metal Gear Solid demo was impressive enough viewed in 2D, but it is fantastic in 3d. Really can't wait to see what Kojima does for the system -- I hope he does actually devote some time to it, and doesn't go full tilt on NGP development. The demo reels of Animal Crossing and Mario Kart were nearby and they looked pretty much as you would expect them to. I can't wait for Mario Kart. They also had a Sky 3D demo. I struggled to see the 3D effect at first, but it looks really good. I hope they look into bringing a live Sky Player to 3DS, and don't limit it to small clips -- it would be amazing...
I was thinking actually, Google / YouTube need to make an app that will play 3D Youtube videos directly on the 3DS.
I hope that's enough for now. I know a lot of you will have read similar impressions before... but suffice to say, I really enjoyed the day and can't wait to get my hands on a system.
at those 3DS just sitting all alone, i hate seeing that when I want to play something so bad, yup i'm jelly lol
