StarDestroyer.Net BBS

What's surprising me is the amount of complaints about the 3D hurting people's eyes which surprises me because you figured something like this would come out from Japan or the fact that people have been playing demos of it for the past year. I see too many faults with this one already like less than stellar battery life, that analog stick just bugs me (but I guess they HAD to make it that way so it would close), and I figured there would be some faults with the 3D.

Anyway ... did anyone pick it up? What are your impressions and what games did you get?

Getting one on launch day (31st March for Australialand).

Got it when it launched in my city.

I'm impressed with it. Didn't find the 3D to be painful at all, but some of friends have complained of headaches after playing it. There is a slider to adjust the depth of 3D, all the way down to 2D if one can't take the 3D at all.

Battery Life is 3-5 hours depending on the game; setting the brightness down from 5 to 3 helps.

I got no complains about the buttons and analog stick.

Unit also comes with a charging dock and a 2GB SD card already in the unit. There's also some AR cards, so you can play some augmented reality mini-games.

Games: Nintendogs+cats, and Ghost Recon Shadow Wars. Nintendogs doesn't introduce anything new except for the cats, which do nothing. It seems easier to train the dogs now. Ghost Recon is a rather good turn based strategy title but nothing special other than the 3D. Launch title lineups are not that great. Everyone's just waiting for June to come around and for Zelda to be released.

Picked it up launch day as well, but didn't get any games with it (Waiting for Resident Evil, MGS3D and Zelda). Had loads of fun at uni putting World War II leaders on Face Raiders, Stalin worked out fantastically. When mecha Churchill opened his mouth and a dozen tiny Hitlers flew out I was laughing pretty hard, too. Don't like AR games much because it's simultaneously encouraging you to move around the card in space, but if you move the camera too far it loses track of the card. You have to get quite close (30-40 cm) so this is an issue when you're maneuvering around it.

The SD card music playback works well enough with some cool visualizers. The 3D camera is sort of neat, but the pathetic resolutions (VGA?!) hold it back from being awesome. The slide-pad (analogue stick thing) is orders of magnitude better than the nub on the PSP, although the D-Pad is in a less than ideal place (still works but it's obvious that the pad is the main movement input device now). The DS playback works as expected, holding select on boot to enable 1:1 pixel mapping really helps give a sharpness boost to the DS image, although the default stretching works fine too.

I payed 288 by price matching to K-Mart ($349 is the RRP) so I was pretty happy with the deal. So far my friends have played it more than I have because they love the tech demos, but I can't wait till I actually get a game for it to really put it through it's paces.