Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

The 3DS is a deceptive device. Because it so closely resembles the current DSi physically, you’re taken aback by the graphics quality it can display. Even discounting the 3D, the images are sharper and the textures more detailed. Intellectually, we know the 3DS is a processor upgrade, but it still surprises in action since it so closely resembles the same DS we’ve been playing since 2004.

At the 3DS press event, I did the rounds on the demo games. Here’s my first impressions of the top names on offer, from Resident Evil to Nintendogs and everything in-between.

Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition: Not that I’m a big Street Fighter guy, but this was one of the most visually striking and instantly playable games at the show. The demo had two view options… standard and dynamic. Standard is, you know, standard. Straight-on Street Fighter as you would expect. The dynamic camera sits over your fighters shoulder, and moves around a lot during attacks. It made stodgy old flat Street Fighter feel more like Soul Calibur to me.

Word is that both the 3D effect and the dynamic camera option can result in dropped frames, which ticks off championship players. Not being a championship player, I liked the more dramatic action.

Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D: Looks great, plays just like Mercenaries mode from RE4 and RE5. The demo had four characters (Chris, Claire, Hunk, Krauser) and two levels. One of the levels was the famous village from the first part of RE5. The controls are similar, but you can now move and shoot, which is a big deal. Holding the right shoulder button readies the weapon, and one of the face buttons shoots. You change weapons and activate heals via the touchscreen.

I guess your affection for this one will be based on how much you loved Mercenaries mode, because that’s all it is. No story, just endless score attack. It reminds me of all those early DS launch games that were mainly old-style arcade games where you just angled for higher and higher scores, like Yoshi Touch-n-Go. Yes, I just equated Resident Evil with Yoshi Touch-n-Go.

RE Mercenaries looks really, really great, however. The enemy models look straight from RE5 (although when the zombies get close you can see some low-poly shortcuts… like the classic N64 straight rectangular arm.)

LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars: This one struck me as a little slow, like Anakin Skywalker’s attack moves were not as fast as they should be. Other than that, it looked and played like a LEGO ____ game. It was certainly a vast graphical improvement over the last LEGO ____ game I played on DS.

Dead or Alive: Dimensions: Another great-looking game. I button-mashed like in Street Fighter, so I can’t say how timing-accurate it was, but it felt smooth and fun. To avoid looking like I was testing DoA breasts in 3D, I selected a random fighter.

Asphalt 3D: Not a bad looking driving game. Very typical stuff, however. It seemed like the biggest selling point was the 3D. When you activate super turbo boost or whatever, the course briefly changes into a TRON-esque neon landscape.

Pilotwings Resort: It’s the long forgotten Pilotwings plus the recently forgotten Wii Sports Resort! Honestly, there seemed little reason to have Pilotwings as a co-brand, except to maybe tweak more old gamer nostalgia.

The demo showed off some very deep and convincing 3D as you fly an airplane or jetpack or glider over Wuhu Island. I’m sure it helps that Wuhu doesn’t exactly carry a ton of visual granularity. The point was to fly through mid-air hoops. After you finished, you can review a 3D replay, which allows full camera manipulation of your run. Very nice! I was told you can also take screenshots.

nintendogs + cats: Another surprise display of improved 3DS graphics… these pets are furry! The demo covered some very familiar ground, showing off a puppy and a kitten. I threw a ball into the room and the puppy invariably got to it first. Same stylus-based stroking controls; the animals reacted according to where I touched them. For example, when I tried to pet the cat’s paws, it pulled them away from me since all cats hate that crap.

Reggie Fils-Aime mentioned that this nintendogs upgrade allows for more variation among animals, so same breeds will not look identical (different heights, etc). He also mentioned that the camera will be used to allow pets to identify their owners, so your dog might not run immediately over when it sees my face.

Steel Diver: Easily the weakest link in the first-party lineup. The poor fellow is the 3DS launch game that nobody wanted.

The demo showed off two modes, a periscope game and a series of side-scrolling missions. The periscope minigame nicely shows off the 3DS gyroscope. The idea is that you have to turn the 3DS around 360 degrees to locate and attack enemy ships. As if you were actually looking through a submarine periscope, get it.

The side-scrolling bits were tedious. You control the sub via a complicated-looking touchsceen. Slider bars control your vessel’s speed and depth. It was all very slow and deliberate. Not much fun.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D: Cleaned up a little bit from the N64 original, but not by much. The landscape is still comprised of old sharp N64 polygons, but the textures are nicer. In Kokiri Village, those little sparkly dust motes look great in 3D. Link’s model is definitely improved, and the inventory system is nicer since it lives on the touchscreen.

Kid Icarus: Uprising: A very fast mix of Starfox 64 and Sin & Punishment. Definitely fun, but the motion is so fast and the control scheme so wobbly that I found myself losing the 3D effect here and there. Either the camera would whip around so fast that my eyes were not adjusting, or the constant shaking of the 3DS itself was shifting the screen out of that sweet spot that creates the 3D.

The demo had two levels, an Easy mission and a Hard mission. Both followed the same template: first, a flying section with Pit zapping enemies out of the sky in an on-rails shooter… followed by an on-foot section with full camera control and exploration (although still with the same shooting). Uprising needs both stylus and analog pad, so you have to cradle the entire system in your left hand with your thumb on the analog circle to move Pit, shoot with the left shoulder button, and direct your shots by controlling the reticle with the touchscreen. In my experience, this one-handed holding scheme is always a trouble sign for a DS game.

I’m sure the demo model’s clunky battery attachment cable wasn’t helping, but Uprising was really shaking that DS thanks to me constantly hammering the shoulder button.

Mii Maker: I can make a better Mii.

The Mii it generated after looking at my face was nothing like the one I hand-fashioned on Wii back in 2006. WHICH EVERYONE AGREES IS SPOT-ON. Mii Maker is cute to see in action, though… and if you don’t really care about putting the time into crafting a perfect likeness, it will suffice. I can see handing a 3DS around a room of people and having everybody spend the 20 seconds it takes to make a Mii, just to add to the system’s internal population.

Face Raiders: Funny stuff. You take a picture of somebody’s face – the poor demo girl had to do this all day – and then that face becomes plastered onto floating enemy attackers. Using the rear-facing cameras, the screen shows your actual environment and makes the baddies appear all around you. Like Steel Diver’s periscope game, you have to spin all around to locate and shoot the faces. Unlike Steel Diver, Face Raiders was fun.

AR Games: The 3DS comes packed with six AR cards. Nothing fancy about them; they’re just cards. There’s no dot.code strip like the eReader cards and no fancy glyphs as in Sony’s Eye of Judgment. The one card available at the demo just had a Mario ? box on it.

The 3DS sees that ? icon and that’s what triggers the augmented reality game. At first, the game was pretty non-inspiring… the 3DS made it look like a box was sitting on the card and I had to shoot it. I mean, it was cool that I could move the 3DS around at any angle and the box image instantly compensated, but still, it was just a box.

Then the card started generated targets, each positioned at different angles that required me to move the 3DS around in mid-air to see them and shoot at them (similar to Face Raiders). Then the table on which the card was sitting physically bulged like a balloon and a tiny jungle landscape erupted out of it. I hit two targets and could not locate the third until the demo girl said “look down.” The 3DS made it look like there was, for lack of a better term, a grave dug into the table, and the target was at the bottom. Once I shot that target, the AR card rose up out of the ground as the jungle folded back into a table. Then a mechanical-looking dragon popped out of a temple structure, and I had to fly the 3DS around the dragon in order to hit all of his neck sections. Wow.