Resident Evil Revelations
This is the game you buy to show off how sick the 3DS’s graphics are. At times this looked like a late-lifespan original X-Box game, like Doom 3 or The Chronicles of Riddick. It’s probably the best of its kind on handhelds, although by console standards the campaign is silly and forgettable. The graphics are intense, but thanks to the ‘meh’ campaign I doubt anyone will be talking about it in a few years.
Grade: B
Super Mario 3D Land
This was really fun but really short. Cute and colorful, it’s full of smile-inducing moments and kept me coming back to play it more. Sadly I beat it in 3 hours and 45 minutes. Whereas some games are half ‘good parts’ half filler, though, this was a 3:45 long, solid ‘good part’ so I don’t feel inclined to complain.
Grade: A-
Zelda Ocarina of Time 3D
“Come on, I’ve got this on the N64 already.” I thought, then changed my mind after all the fun I had with this. The overhauled graphics are amazing, the 3D depth felt like a meaningful addition to the overall ‘look’ and atmosphere, and the motion controls (where you move the system around to aim your bow and arrow) were not only cool, they were useful! Plus pocket Zelda is way cool. It is a definitive improvement over the original. I was sad when I beat this game and I wish Nintendo would port Majora’s mask soon.
Grade: A
Kid Icarus Uprising
This is my personal favorite 3DS game. Like ‘Star Fox’, you fly along a rigid track through different lands shooting at airborne enemies. The visuals are breathtakingly grandiose (this would have been impossible on the original DS) and the shooting action is explosive and gratifying, with different weapons you can obtain with special properties such as guided shots, incendiary, penetrating lasers, and other weird combinations. Many people had some problems with this game I want to address: controls and annoying voice acting. The controls involve moving your character with the joystick and awkwardly aiming with the stylus. I didn’t find this awkward since I hold the system an unusual way, namely tucking the system in between my pinky and third finger then using my index and thumb to hold the stylus. It felt pretty natural, for me anyway. Concerning the voice acting, the characters talk all the time. There is no point in the game where the characters aren’t talking. I thought it added self-deprecating levity to the game but others found it annoying. Personally I thought it was funny.
Grade: A
Mario Kart 7
As a Mario Kart game this isn’t bad. I’m not thrilled with it, though, and here’s why: my first handheld Mario Kart was on the Gameboy Advance. Later I got a Nintendo DS Lite with Mario Kart DS. It flabbergasted me. I knew it would have been utterly impossible for such a game to run on the old Gameboy Advance. The difference between Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart 3DS, unfortunately, is not so dramatic. I think this could have basically been ported to the DS and except for more pixelated graphics I’m not sure I could tell the difference. So my reaction was mostly, “Oh, another Mario Kart. That’s cool, I guess.”
Grade: B
New Super Mario Bros. 2
Compared to other 2D platformers this is great. Compared to other Mario games this is lazy. I can remember growing up every time a new Mario game came out, it did something really neat that made it stand out from the one before. It was what made Mario a big deal. This game just feels like an update of New Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo DS. Which isn’t bad, but it falls short of the legacy that made it great in the first place.
Grade: B
Star Fox 64 3D
This is just the Nintendo 64 Star Fox with totally overhauled graphics. There’s a lot of robots and spaceships to blow up and weird planets to travel to. My main objection was that I didn’t find this to be particularly replayable. My 3DS indicates I spent 2 and a half hours playing this and I haven’t touched it since. Also I remember in some parts although the character models are updated to highly detailed 3DS level graphics, it retains the floaty character animation from the original, such as one robotic looking scene where General Pepper thanks Fox and his gang for saving the world. It doesn’t make it any less fun but it’s a little weird.
Grade: B
Ridge Racer 3D
This does a good job of everything a racing game ought to do and that’s about it. You drive fast, you pass pretty scenery… that sums it up. I remember thinking I liked Burnout on the PSP better than this because you got to have explosive, Michael Bay-like altercations. For what this sets out to do it’s not bad though.
Grade: B
Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition
This is a game where I’d sit down meaning to play for 10 minutes then end up playing for 40. I’ve never played the XBOX 360 or PS3 version, so the whole experience was new to me. The graphics are sizzlingly good, full of awe-inspiringly badass animations of crazy martial artists beating each other up. The gameplay has depth, where playing more seems to the constant discovery of little tricks to get better and better. I racked up about 40 hours on this game. It’s awesome.
Grade: A
Code of Princess
Holy smokes this sucks. I expected a decent clone of the 1998 Sega Saturn game Guardian Heroes, but this doesn’t live up to those standards at all. All you do is press the same buttons over and over to punch monsters in the face the exact same identical way over and over again. You get experience points to spend on different skills at the end of each level, but I honestly couldn’t perceive how they had any impact on anything. The controls feel sluggish involving this infuriating delay where the characters never quite ‘move’ right, so I never felt in total control of the action. The environments are full of uninspired villages and forests and the story is incoherent anime hogwash. I wouldn’t wish this game on some of my worst enemies.
Grade: F
Nintendo EShop
Dark Void Zero (from the DSi eShop)
This is designed to look and sound like an NES game from 1987. It’s charming, fun, and cool. You control a space man with a jet pack who must explore, pick up weapons, and shoot aliens. To me it felt sorta like a lite mashup of Contra, Megaman, and Metroid. My only complaint is that it’s really short (less than 2 hours), but it was a 2 hour long good part with no stupid filler so I can’t complain.
Grade: A-
Kirby’s Adventure (3D Classics Ediction)
This was simply delightful. It’s a NES game from 1993 with added 3D effects. The controls have a well tuned feeling to them that makes just running, jumping, and flying around a joy. Kirby’s ability to eat enemies and absorb their powers was neat, making me look forward to finding enemies with weird abilities to steal. Despite the low resolution the graphics are still expressive, with cute animations and many smile-inducing moments. The 3D made the game ‘pop’. I just can’t come up with anything bad to say about this game.
Grade: A
Cave Story
In this game, you play as a boy who wakes up in a cave with no memory of his former life. As you explore, you discover an underground village of rabbit people being terrorized by a mad scientist. You have to intervene and save them. Cave Story plays like a more nimble version of Contra or Metal Slug; you find progressively more powerful weapons as you get farther, and every so often you have to fight a boss. I love how you can aim the machine gun down and it actually propels you in the air from the sheer force of its shots. The music is a delightful collection of chiptunes like Shining Force or Pokemon and the graphics look like a Super Nintendo game from the early 1990’s. The game has numerous possible outcomes depending on actions you take. I love this game and I can see why there's been so much buzz about it on the indie PC game scene.
Grade: A
Shantae: Risky’s Revenge (from the DSi eShop)
Imagine a cross of Super Metroid and Disney’s Aladdin with the graphics of Metal Slug and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Shantae is like. Most people seem to balk at a $12 downloadable game, but this 7-hour quest felt to me as if it could have been a full priced retail title. You control a genie girl who kills bad guys by whipping them with her hair. Later power ups include hadoken-like fireballs, spiked balls that spin around you, and Zelda: Majora’s Mask-esque animal transformations that let you access new areas. My only complaints are that it’s not always clear where to go next and I had to look up a guide a few times to regain my bearings. Otherwise this game is great.
Grade: A
Mighty Switch Force
Made by the same guys responsible for Shantae: Risky’s Revenge, this game lives up to the same high standards. It takes place in a cartoon cyberpunk world where you are an android cop with a blaster pistol dispatched to catch a bunch of escaped prisoners. You can run, jump, and shoot, but also ‘flip’ certain blocks in the stages into ‘on’ or ‘off’ positions, for instance to create bridge you can cross, or clear a path previously blocked off. Each stage lasts no longer than a few minutes, but the mechanic of flipping stuff on and off becomes more complicated as the stages progress so you constantly come up with new approaches to catch all the prisoners. The graphics have the same exquisite, Metal Slug-like detail as Shantae, ranging from the eerie cyberpunk backgrounds, the flirtatious all-female cast of escaped prisoners, or the enemies wandering around the stages to eat you. I was pleased to find it has as much reflex-demanding action as it does brain taxing puzzles. The soundtrack really got my blood pumping.
Grade: A-
VVVVVV
In this game you’re the captain of a ship that gets lost in space. Your ship lands in a weird dimension where all your crew mates are lost and gravity flips upside down every time you jump. So you have to wander outside your ship into a cavernous, threatening world full of obstacles to save them all. The ‘gravity flipping’ mechanic is neat, demanding both problem solving skills and quick reflexes. The world map reminded me a lot of the original Legend of Zelda, where you wander through a sprawling domain before finding a dungeon to break into. Designed to look and sound like a 1980’s Commodore 64 game, the game’s style is super charming, with a rockin’ soundtrack and graphics that hail back to a time when video games depended more on the players’ imaginations than almost unlimited computer memory. I felt like I’d come back in one piece from a dangerous adventure when I beat it, and I still might go back and replay it to collect all the bonus secrets hidden throughout its stages.
Grade: A
Review of the 3DS in general:
Personally I like the 3D effect a lot. I crank it up when I’m indoors, usually all the way. I crank it down when it’s late in the day and my eyes are tired, or when sunlight is glaring on the screen, or in some strangely intense games when it borders on vertigo-inducing (namely Resident Evil Relevations). It’s less like playing on a ‘screen’ and more like playing on a pane of glass connected to a six inch deep box with stuff moving around inside the box. In some games stuff even appeared to violently spring out at me, like some laser beam shootouts in Kid Icarus. To me the difference between the 3D turned on and off felt a little like hi-res and lo-res setting on some PC games. It just makes the graphics look sexier by increasing the detail and making things stand out.
You can look at the 3DS as a glass that’s half full or half empty. If you’re in the ‘half full’ camp then you’ll probably love it. Between the main 3DS library and the eShop’s offerings, there’s a lot of fun stuff out there. If you look at it more cynically, almost everything on the 3DS worth playing is already available somewhere else. Plus other games to me just felt like slightly remade versions of their predecessors (Mario Kart 7, New Super Mario Bros. 2). The only neat exclusives on the 3DS I’d bring up are Kid Icarus: Uprising, Super Mario 3D Land, and Mighty Switch Force, but I’m reluctant to point at either of those as a specific reason to spend $200.
Considering all the fun I’ve had with mine, though, I’m satisfied. My only regret is that I wish I had held out just a few months for the 3DS XL to come out, since its monstrous screen is well worth the extra $40. If the 3DS already seems appealing to you I’m sure you’ll like it. If you think it’s lame I can’t really insist that playing one will change your mind.