Now that the 3DS is out, and I've seen it for myself. (Though I haven't seen most of what it has to offer yet, I'll be seeing that this Friday when my friend brings over hers with SSFIV.) I thought we would talk about those who are skeptical about the 3DS... our fellow Nintendo fans that seem to cry out, 'It's just a gimmick!' and don't feel the same way most of us do about the system.

It seems like the 3DS is facing the same problems the Wii and DS had during their launches. Both the DS and Wii were called gimmicks, but yet they both held up and are two of the highest selling consoles/handhelds of all time... yet... people seem to not remember that.

I was watching T.V. with my friend the other day, the launch day of the 3DS, and a commercial for it came on. I started talking about the capabilities of the system and my excitement for it... and for some reason, he became hostile... angry... and I have no idea why, because he's a huge Nintendo fan like I am...

What is it with this hostility towards the 3DS?

Is it the price? The time of launch?

I'm not sure if you guys have met anyone who has this unwarranted hatred towards the system, but I've seen at least two cases, and I've seen a few on the gamespot forums, but those are usually self-explanatory.... though there are still some from Nintendo fans.

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3d is just as much as a gimick as blu-ray and hd. But i see no one calling those out. If one stops for a moment to look at the quality of picture whist playing a 3ds unit, I feel these arguments would fall.

There have been tons of remakes in HD for the xbox but they are confusingly welcomes more so than this new console.
I for one dont like nor get hd, as it just looks really bland to me.
Also if the 3ds did not have 3d as a feature where could one find a 3d gaming experience?--Minus the purchase of a 2000+(depending on where youre living) dollar televison.
Yes,if there were alternative sources with the same features openly available id call it a gimmick.
But in current Nintendo has created monopoly on the market.
For further example. The wii brought about motion controlls. Then there comes along kinetic and move,that are add on peripherals.

This making motion controls a gimmick(for those said console).
Being that its open source and console can achieve it.
But nintendo is still the original and has made more use of the fuction that the console was made for.

Is playing platformers in 3D really that much different? I guess I'm skeptical that you now "know" exactly how far to jump or where an object is. I'm not sure I ever had a problem with it in well-designed platformers. Like, I don't remember having a problem with estimating how far a platform is from me to make the jump.

It seems to me that super-precise actual platforming like 2D platformers give you will stay in the 2D platforming realm. I think most of the imprecision comes from the ability to move in three dimensions, not the lack of the virtual 3D image.

@Zero

I don't disagree that 3D platforming was dumbed down from its 2D counterparts, but acting like 3D is making new level of difficulty possible is asinine. You even made my point for me, it's still going to be possible without Stereoscopy.

Nintendo made Mario platforming extremely accessible with the transition to 3D, but they didn't need to do that. It probably would have been idiotic for them.

Saying Nintendo has this new found freedom with platforming 3D, but it's still going to be entirely playable in 2D isn't helping your position at all, you're arguing my own point for me.

@Paperclyp

I guess we'll see when Mario 3DS comes out. But the fact is, Nintendo is saying "hey, now we can do it properly", and I don't see any reason not to believe them.

Platforming has been gimped in the move to polygons, time to correct this.

@ObscureMotives

But if it's much, much harder to play without the stereoscopy, I don't see how that means 3D is a gimmick, or "doesn't change the way we play".

Who came up with this metric anyway? Since when does something have to revolutionize our games to be deemed acceptable?

Even if the only thing 3D did was make games look better... since when are people not graphics whores? I've been playing Steel Diver, and since it's 2D the stereoscopy doesn't add to the gameplay, yet... it looks frickin' cool! And games are gonna get much better-looking than Steel Diver...

I don't see the reason for the backlash, except from people who unfortunately can't see the 3D. They have a valid reason, not sure about anyone else though.

@Pandareus

By Nintendo's own guidelines 3D isn't going to offer a substantial change to game play, so that really rules out these "pro platformers" zero thinks are going to happen.

As for needing to revolutionize to be acceptable, it doesn't, but If it doesn't offer something revolutionary, it should at least be better, and with the focusing issue of stereoscopy and the glasses free and other compromises It's hard to say that. It's not as easy to look at, to me it feels unnatural, people get headaches, some people can't see the effect at all.

What did 3D do for films? it gave them a reason to charge us more money and some new tech to get excited about but at the end of the day, the film is going to stand on its own legs 3D or not, and the 3DS won't be any different. So if that doesn't make 3D a gimmick, i don't know what is.

In movies when it's well done, it can enhance the experience, for instance Toy Story 3.

But we're not talking movies, we're talking games, in which you control a character and spatial awareness is important. Completely different thing. Nintendo's guidelines don't change the fact that stereoscopic 3D gives players an advantage there.

Pandareus said:
Who came up with this metric anyway? Since when does something have to revolutionize our games to be deemed acceptable?

The more verbose Nintendo fans circa 2005.

@Pandareus

I can't comment on Toy Story 3, but I don't think the tradeoff of 3D is worth and supposed spatial awareness advantage.

By tradeoff I man the fact that your eyes need to be focused on the plane of the screen, but the 3D affect tricks your brain into thinking the image is in front or behind that plane. Since the image isn't actually in that plane, you can't naturally focus on it.

As an example I played Asphalt 3D, and they made the HUD items 3D and whenever I looked away from the action to check my HUD, my eyes would naturally try and adjust to the focal distance, which is impossible, It felt unnatural and it made me stop trying to check the HUD, effectively creating a tunnel vision effect to me. This isn't some small problem either, it is a part of stereoscopic 3D, any spatial awareness advantage is going to need to overcome that, which from my experience isn;t going to happen.

@stephen08
This is true, it was primarily Nintendo fans defending Wii that started this whole mantra of "graphics do no matter, gameplay is everything".

Personally I never agreed with that, I think graphics do matter, a lot, video games are a visual medium. Of course gameplay matters too, games looking great and playing well have never been mutually exclusive. I remember the first time I played Mario 64, I was blown away on every level, graphics, music, animation, controls, it was just so beautiful and so fun. It wasn't until Wii that good graphics became the enemy of a certain fanatical breed of Nintendo gamer.

Anyway, here we are over half a decade later and Nintendo's new system's primary selling point is eye candy. Trying to argue that 3-D will improve gameplay and allow Nintendo to make harder platformers is kind of futile IMHO, Nintendo is about making games more accessible, not harder. And besides, the 3-D can be turned off, no game will rely on it. The 3-D is eye candy, kick-ass eye candy that makes games more immersive and beautiful IMO, buy eye candy none the less.

@ObscureMotives
Each player is different, I have no problem reading the floating HUD in Ridge Racer, I think it looks cool as hell actually.

Also, Asphalt is just terrible on every level, the framerate is practically in the single-digits, if I were you I wouldn't use such a horrible game as a benchmark for the system, in any capacity.

@Paperclyp
Oh, come on; EVERYBODY had the minor annoyance of missing a '?' block completely. You were just having so much fun you didn't really care. It was expected. Now, you really SUCK if you miss the block!

@deathly_hallows

asphalt is what i have to go on, so that's what I'm going to work with.

I'm not really saying I have a problem seeing it, but the problem is the 3D process makes you think that different things have different focal lengths when they don't and switching between them is unnatural.

Your eyes need to be focused at the distance to the screen, even when looking at things that appear behind and in front of the screen layer. your eyes are designed to converge on things that are closer, and when that object isn't actually closer, thinks get awkward, and the only way to mitigate the problem is to keep things "closer" to the screen, so the focal length doesn't change much between layers, so effectively the only way to mitigate the problem of 3D is to make everything less 3D.

This problem is integral to the way stereoscopy works, so it's always going to be a problem.

@ObscureMotives First off let's not call people's views asinine, that isn't the kind of site we run here.

Second off I think you missed my point completely. I said it would be playable in 2D, I didn't say it would be playable well in 2D. All I'm saying is that developers can make a super difficult platformer that works best in 3D but can technically still be played in 2D, thus still technically fitting Nintendo's rule that all games have to be playable in 2D. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be much worse off in 2D, it just means that 3D wouldn't be a requirement to play the game.

And Super Mario 3DS may end up being this game. It also may not. But it was debuted by Iwata as a game development concept, and the concept was in the context specifically of how 3D can help jumping in a platformer. And I believe he brought up many of the above mentioned "tricks" and said that this game wouldn't need to rely on those. I doubt he would debut the game like this if Nintendo wasn't planning on using this game to show the benefits of jumping in 3D.

@stephen08 Don't derail the discussion holmes.

deathly_hallows said:

Trying to argue that 3-D will improve gameplay and allow Nintendo to make harder platformers is kind of futile IMHO, Nintendo is about making games more accessible, not harder.

But it is about making them more accessible, it would only be making them "harder" if the games had a lot of hardcore platforming without 3D. Basically, what excites me and many others isn't that something like Super Mario 3DS can be harder, it is that it can be more of a true platformer without being hard for the wrong reasons. And considering that Iwata debuted Super Mario 3DS in the midst of a discussion about this very thing, I think that is the idea behind this game.

@Zero

Alright. Wasn't me who brought it up in the first place though.

Charles, your favorite launch title is Ridge Racer; tell me it wouldn't be just another Ridge Racer if you weren't able to judge distances like you can with the 3D screens. Anybody that doesn't believe that true 3D screens displaying 3D games is not going to benefit said 3D games needs to reassess their opinion. The problem has always been the fact that we are attempting to interpret a 3D space on a 2D plane. While some of us have become quite good at it, you will miss stuff in the translation.

In m limited time with the 3DS I can already see how the 3D will benefit gameplay in many ways. The fact that the 3D effect plays mostly with depth perception rather than stuff popping out of the screen confirms this.

@Deerock69
Playing Ridge Racer in 3-D doesn't improve my performance at all, I can do equally well with the 3-D on or off, in fact I could probably even do a tiny bit better with the 3-D off because sometimes during the natural course of play the screen will tilt a tiny bit and I'll see double for a second, that's caused me to hit a wall more than once...

Still I play with the 3-D on because I like the way it looks, the game is a lot more exciting when shit is flying at the screen towards you, like when you run through a puddle and the screen gets splashed with water droplets, the little touches like that really blow my mind and make the game feel a lot more immersive to me.

I know what Iwata said, that 3-D will improve gameplay, but I don't really believe it, hitting a block in 3-D space will always be more difficult than 2-D because you're adding another axis that the player has to align. Maybe in certain games you can perceive depth a little better but the finickiness of having to occasionally adjust your angle or play with the 3-D slider mid-game seems to negate any slight advantages the 3-D might have. Also just the fact that Nintendo has repeatedly said 3-D is optional is proof positive that 3-D will not be required for accurate gameplay.

Whether or not Nintendo ever makes a game that RELIES on 3D, it could be done. (Like 3D platforming through small, mid-air platforms.) If they don't do it, it's because they don't want to exclude any players. (Maybe we'll see something 3D-'exclusive' on 3DSWare?)

@Simbabbad

I gave you full credit! Listen to the damn podcast!

Not only that, but Panda tried to get you on that podcast and you weren't having it. So what else could he do but steal your words?!

No but seriously, what else was I supposed to do but steal your words and call you a dirty Frenchie?