Sometimes you just have to buy a thing.
Therefore, this weekend I joined the ranks of Early Adopters and helped myself to a Nintendo 3DS. On one hand, it was hardly an impulse purchase: I budgeted around the $250 price-tag, and I'd been considering buying one for at least two weeks prior. On the other, though, given the lean launch-title roster and the fact that I already own a DSi, it seemed like an indulgence more than anything.
This is the fundamental obstacle Nintendo is faced with right now, having saturated the market with new editions of their handheld console: The original DS was released in 2004, the DS Lite in 2006, the DSi in 2009 and the DSi XL in 2010, almost exactly a year to the day prior to the 3DS' release date. These are all essentially the same device, with the exception of (primarily) cosmetic alterations - the DS Lite was smaller, the DSi XL had considerably larger screens, and so forth - but in basic form and function, every system released under the DS banner has operated in an identical fashion.
The Nintendo DS is the best-selling handheld of all time, which may be accounted for by the near-yearly re-launches of the system. There has always been a shiny new version of the DS on the market, boasting a flashy redesign and extraneous "features", and each release has been accompanied by a potent marketing campaign.
What's strange about this is that Nintendo has earned itself a reputation as an innovator in the current gaming industry. Motion control with the Wii, the eponymous dual screens and touch-screen of the DS, and other intuitive, player-immersive features have made Nintendo an industry leader (heck, even the light gun that came with the original Nintendo Entertainment System was astonishing in its day). From an empirical standpoint, they have introduced new ways of gaming to players which have subsequently been aped by their competitors. So there's this strange duality to Nintendo, where on one side of the coin they regularly alter the face of videogaming with their clever and brilliantly-implemented ideas, and on the other side, they are content to slap a new coat of metaphorical paint on their existing devices and repackage them as the latest and greatest.
All of this is to make the point that the 3DS straddles the line between these two facets of Nintendo. It most certainly is, at heart, just another Nintendo DS with all-new bells and whistles, but one of those bells and\or whistles is so revolutionary it almost validates the hefty price tag. Not to mention the fact that the hardware is, allegedly, souped-up and next-gen (Nintendo has not officially released specs on the 3DS).
I'm not going to lie: the 3D feature of the 3DS is impressive. It's so novel I couldn't NOT own one. Even if the market saturation backfires and the 3DS ends up a casualty alongside the Virtual Boy and R.O.B. The Robot, it's going to look good doing it. But for the average handheld aficionado - especially the younger set, who are simultaneously more concerned with the immediate wow factor and harder to keep interested, in the long run, than grown-up nerds - it's a tough sell, especially considering the DSi XL is only a year old and there aren't a ton of device-specific games that take advantage of the feature just yet.
Here's my run-down of the Nintendo 3DS, what was promised, and what we actually got.
