My 3DS review/impressions


I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and singing lalalala when it comes to the 3DS. I hadn't the foggiest clue that it was a successor. They've just released too many consoles for me to care anymore... And when a 10" tablet gets a better battery life than their latest handheld offering, despite packing a dual core CPU and a GPU that ejaculates pure graphical awesome onto it's screen, they're doing something wrong.


I'll wait for the 3DSiXLite. In the interim, Golden Sun 3 is wubbley!
 
I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and singing lalalala when it comes to the 3DS. I hadn't the foggiest clue that it was a successor. They've just released too many consoles for me to care anymore... And when a 10" tablet gets a better battery life than their latest handheld offering, despite packing a dual core CPU and a GPU that ejaculates pure graphical awesome onto it's screen, they're doing something wrong.


I'll wait for the 3DSiXLite. In the interim, Golden Sun 3 is wubbley!
You sure have a funny way of not caring. ;)


Anyway, I should certainly hope that your unrelated tablet device that costs £400 should get better battery life than a £175-to-£220 handheld game console. After all, you've paid a lot more money for it.


Enjoy Golden Sun 3.
 
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I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and singing lalalala when it comes to the 3DS. I hadn't the foggiest clue that it was a successor. They've just released too many consoles for me to care anymore... And when a 10" tablet gets a better battery life than their latest handheld offering, despite packing a dual core CPU and a GPU that ejaculates pure graphical awesome onto it's screen, they're doing something wrong.


I'll wait for the 3DSiXLite. In the interim, Golden Sun 3 is wubbley!
You sure have a funny way of not caring. ;)


Anyway, I should certainly hope that your unrelated tablet device that costs £400 should get better battery life than a £175-to-£220 handheld game console. After all, you've paid a lot more money for it.


Enjoy Golden Sun 3.

Price is tangental to the whole problem. I expect a handheld gaming device to pack a reasonable battery life first and foremost, whatever the cost. We seem to have come backwards from the GBA SP, which I managed to marathon through Golden Sun 1 and 2 on in a couple of charges. Jesus, the GBA SP is so good that I dug it out of a box after *years* (3+) of it being unused and still got a few hours out of it. The GBA cost me half what the 3DS does now. Probably a little more than half if you factor in inflation. Has technology really gone backwards?


The world seems full of mass-appeal disposable shit these days, and gadgets sure aren't what they used to be. Even the iPad is throw-away technology, the 2 is freakin' glued together and effectively impossible to service.


I have the same view of the PSP, it's just got steadily worse right up until the Go, which is the epitome of fail.


Is hard to continue ignoring the 3DS when there's a lovely thread to troll :D In a few months I'll probably have bought two. If it didn't have that eye-development-ruining 3D bollocks I'd buy my daughter one for her 4th b'day. Nintendogs was pretty good. She likes EyePet. Good excuse, eh! Muwahaha.


P.S. I love to play into the Apple douchebaggery role, and those flash game knock-offs sure as hell placate the little one. They really do need to invent trouser pockets that fit the iPad. I really should stop whining about the 3DS sucktitude and start playing my DS.
 
You can still buy a 3DS for your daughter if you turn the 3D slider to the off position and break it, so that it no longer can be switched on for any 3D.
 
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I'm still hoping for some company to release a solution similar to what Logitech did with their G7 mouse. That mouse came with 2 batteries and a charing station with a battery slot, so instead of attaching the mouse to the charging station you would just swap batteries, which was an easy and painless process.


If the maker of the battery packs was trustworthy, I'd buy this kind of 3DS charging solution without a second thought.


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A curious, and positive, side-effect the 3D effect is having for me is that I'm finding myself better aware of things around me in real life as well. I'm noticing that it's improving my judgement of long distances and volumes a bit when working with various things.
So I'm not the only one to experience that.


This makes me wonder if a realistic virtual driving school for 3DS could have a special effect. Well, I also wonder what possible effects an UNrealistic virtual driving school for 3DS could have...


It's /Related Interesting Tidbit Time!/ This time: Guessing the length and distance of things is one of Shigeru Miyamoto's obsessions.


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seeing as i dont have my pandora yet, and youre also an owner of sennheisers, please compare 3ds sound, mainly headphone output(but also speakers), to pandora sound. of course only compare music using mp3s as the 3ds doesnt support flac for now so it wouldnt be fair


and yes, i am quite impressed with the 3ds headphone output, im sure it helps im using $250 headphones, but whatever
What headphones did you test the 3DS with? When trying to use Sennheiser IE8 with my 3DS, I found that I have to push the plug all the time or the 3DS will stop recognizing the headphones. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the tolerances of the Sennheiser IE8 plug, its design, the design or tolerances of the 3DS headphone jack, or maybe if I got a faulty 3DS (but I suppose they just don't play (pun not at all intended) very well together).


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I probably won't get a 3DS for a year or so, maybe not until they make an 'XL' version, [...]

Kenichi Sugino said:
[...] we don't have any short-term plans for creating a more compact version of Nintendo 3DS like we did with Nintendo DS Lite.
Source: http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/iwata/iwata_asks_-_nintendo_3ds_30756_31133.html


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edit-30mar2011-0101GMT+2:

If it didn't have that eye-development-ruining 3D bollocks I'd buy my daughter one for her 4th b'day.
Nintendo advises parents to not let children that are 6 years of age or younger use the 3D function. For this reason, the 3D (amongst other features) can be disabled completely in the 3DS' settings, and the setting can be locked with a 4-digit PIN.
 
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I'm still hoping for some company to release a solution similar to what Logitech did with their G7 mouse. That mouse came with 2 batteries and a charing station with a battery slot, so instead of attaching the mouse to the charging station you would just swap batteries, which was an easy and painless process.


If the maker of the battery packs was trustworthy, I'd buy this kind of 3DS charging solution without a second thought.
I wonder how feasible it is? I never considered that as a solution, as I'll most likely be picking up the Nyko pack myself. I get about four/five hours as it is, so I think that one should do fine for me.

So I'm not the only one to experience that.
So I'm not the only one, either? :p (It's proving useful for my hobbies, too, incidentally, which is another bonus.)

Well, I also wonder what possible effects an UNrealistic virtual driving school for 3DS could have...
We call it Mario Kart. :lol: The effect is probably something like this;

https://www.youtube.com/embed/-h4zTEwgCpQ?feature=oembed
 
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If you want a portable tablet, buy a 7" Android model, preferably from a GPL compliant manufacturer like Archos or Samsung. Steve Jobs has decreed that the proliterate shall use their authorized iPhone for mobile computing needs and thus the bequeathed tablets will remain intentionally akward, and thou shall have no Flash.

Even the iPad is throw-away technology, the 2 is freakin' glued together and effectively impossible to service.
What's new or novel about that?

The iMacs that showed up when Jobs got back where blatantly made of thermoplastics, aka "cheap plastic" with plenty of corner cutting on display and Macintosh was the one particularly fingered with the Foxconn suicides. Really even if you go back to Apple II, their first real PC, those were redesigned to be vastly cheaper to fab and thus maximize profit margin before they hit stride. Commodore's product line was superior to theirs for pretty much the entire run while being cheaper and not requiring bribing a company to gain access to their facilities so they can outright steal their work and claim it as one's own as Jobs as good as admits he did to Xerox Alto.


And no you can't finger Bill Gates as doing the same. Bill Gates suggested QDOS as an alternative to CP/M, but had no part in its creation and no evidence ever came forward to damn the man who did write QDOS despite the media having a heyday attacking him. It wasn't until the revision of that, which replaced almost all the code to operate as a HDD instead of disk operating system that Microsoft really was even involved with OS writing. Their big product was BASIC, which Apple and the rest used rather heavily. When Microsoft did decide to start the Windows project they actually bought a license from Apple, which the legal ruling of the related case agreed covered everything that wasn't the equivalent of trying to patent troll for loops. So even the "they stole the GUI from Apple" doesn't even begin to parse with what actually happened, and is a particularly asinine given it always ignores the Amiga Workbench was ahead of both.

I've been sticking my fingers in my ears and singing lalalala when it comes to the 3DS. I hadn't the foggiest clue that it was a successor. They've just released too many consoles for me to care anymore... And when a 10" tablet gets a better battery life than their latest handheld offering, despite packing a dual core CPU and a GPU that ejaculates pure graphical awesome onto it's screen, they're doing something wrong.
So let me see if I get this right. First you rail on the use of a 1300mAh battery due to an overemphasis on thin, and then you want to wait for a thinner version? Which given battery tech isn't changing radically anytime soon would result in worse battery life unless they overhauled the screen or they're producing their chip ridiculously far up the process iteration chain.

I'm not sure why you're obsessing on what Apple's offerings. Based on what the A4 eventually was revealed to be the A5 should be just another off the shelf ARM design with nothing really special about it at all.
 
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regarding the headphone jack, youre not the only one with that "problem", me, and many other have to force the jack in all the way first few times, it really takes a lot of force to get it in completely, which was rather annoying because i would always press the L trigger while trying to push it in, it gets a looser after 10 or so inserts. so in other words, just make sure the plug is actually all the way in
 
so in other words, just make sure the plug is actually all the way in
But there's only 1mm (for those living in the US: that's 3.24077649 × 10^-20 Parsecs) left to push in, and it seems to me like it would require excessive force.


What I forgot to mention is that my Sony MDR-NC020 do work without a problem with the 3DS.


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I'm still hoping for some company to release a solution similar to what Logitech did with their G7 mouse. That mouse came with 2 batteries and a charing station with a battery slot, so instead of attaching the mouse to the charging station you would just swap batteries, which was an easy and painless process.


If the maker of the battery packs was trustworthy, I'd buy this kind of 3DS charging solution without a second thought.
I wonder how feasible it is? I never considered that as a solution, as I'll most likely be picking up the Nyko pack myself. I get about four/five hours as it is, so I think that one should do fine for me.
I believe that it'd sell even if it cost quite a bit. The problems that I can see with Nyko's battery pack are that it further increases the 3DS' charging time, and it changes the shape and weight of the 3DS which /might/ impede the usability of the input methods (q.e.d.). As for technical realization, it should be possible to create a 3DS back cover that makes it possible to clip in special batteries without a huge loss of battery runtime.


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Well, I also wonder what possible effects an UNrealistic virtual driving school for 3DS could have...
We call it Mario Kart. (...)
"Mario Kart", huh? Yeah, I think I've heard of that before... :)


I think the racing game in Super Monkey Ball 3D, despite being the most cloney Mario Kart that I've ever seen, didn't do me any harm so far any didn't any do didn't do me any harm so far. But what about more realistic driving software - imagine a pilot training in a flight simulator that has subtle non-realistic elements, the results could be disastrous.
 
^ Ahh, yes, I see what you mean. I would hope that nobody would put all of their training into an unrealistic simulation alone. :lol:
 
I have had one since launch day and its cool. Both myself and my 14 year old newphew agree that the pandora is the better unit. The 3ds has a much better build quality on it than the pandora, but we just find the pandora more fun. Part of this is the limited number of good games fro the 3ds, OS features that are missing until we have updates, and 3D that does NOT look as good as my nvidia 3d vision. I can see the potential in this unit. I would wait 6 months if you are looking for more games to come out and for some of the OS features missing to be patched in.
 
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