Here’s a quick look at the crazy cooking title, America’s Test Kitchen: Let’s Get Cooking. It’s essentially a very thorough cookbook with 300 recipes and a lot of very odd features – including voice control – so you can scroll through recipes almost effortlessly. It’s beguilingly strange to “play” a cookbook on the DSi XL .
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Yesterday’s Nintendo 3DS took everyone by surprise. Who expected that Nintendo would announce its next big thing on a random Tuesday in March. Not us. Curious what Sony has to say about it? Well, basically don’t expect a 3D PSP any time soon. IGN UK’s interview with SCEA’s Director of Hardware and Marketing John Koller “Our focus on 3D right now is on the console,” he said. “There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity on PlayStation 3 with 3D. The amount of interest in 3D from the retail side and game publishers is off the charts. We know we have a hit with 3D on PS3 and we’re going to concentrate our efforts there.” Remember the last time Sony initially questioned Nintendo’s approach? Yeah, let me introduce you to the don’t-call-it-a-Wii-Remote-clone-even-though-it-clearly-is Playstation Move .
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Nintendo’s announcement of its new portable 3D gamimg device 3DS was very brief, prompting us to speculate about possible features and implications for the way people will play games in the future. But today the Nikkei , Japan’s Wall Street Journal, is offering a bit more insight (and the Nikkei is usually a very reliable source). As a reminder, what we know so far is that the new hardware won’t require any glasses for users to see the 3D images, will be backwards compatible to DS and DSi games, make its debut between April 2010 and March 2011, and make its debut at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles in June. Here are all new details the Nikkei was able to dig up: – Nintendo says the 3DS will be the first device of its kind. – It will be sold, probably in Japan first, in the latter half of this year. – Nintendo considers giving the 3DS a 3D joystick, force feedback and an accelerometer. – The company already secured patents for several 3DS-related technologies last year. – Compared to its 2D-based predecessors, the new device will feature improved wireless communications speed and battery life. – The screen will be not be larger than four inches (the DSi XL’s screen is 4.2 inches). Another interesting thing to note is that Nintendo shares traded above 30,000 yen ($330) for the first time in over 11 months Wednesday (30,850 yen, which is 2,880 yen above Tuesday’s close). Investors have big expectations for 3D, it seems. Via The Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
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Turn up the mic, I can’t see Is the Nintendo 3DS going to work? Are you kidding, of course it is! Parametric Generators could power your watch with street noise Insert smiley emoticons hands-free with Auto Smiley Nintendo 3DS: Look who just innovated itself out of a paper bag! Contest: Hardees/Carl’s Jr. and CrunchGear love you and want you to be happy
Excuse our enthusiasm, but here’s the DSi XL unboxed for all and sundry. Enjoy!
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We have a great hands on up but did you know the DSi XL came with the tiniest press kit in the world? The kid includes all the specs but is written on little sheets of paper about 2 inches by 3 inches. There’s even a mini business card! Say what you want about PR people, but I’m smitten.
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The beauty of the Internet is that it demands instant analysis of every single development to come out of Peoria. The Nintendo 3DS —out of Kyoto, which is not Peoria, I’m afraid—was announced overnight, time zone permitting. It will debut at E3 in June, and it will forever change the way you and I… do something . Something video game-related, methinks. If one thing’s certain, it does mean that 3D is here to stay. I’m sorry. Say what you will about Avatar , but it made quite a bit of scratch. Then CES came around, in January, and every single TV manufacturer held presentation after presentation, laser light show after laser light show, trumpeting their fancy 3D TVs. None of the TVs are compatible with each other, so if you buy Company A’s TV and your neighbor buys Company B’s, y’all can’t get together to watch the World Cup in 3D—the glasses won’t allow it. The GameCube barely displaced any water—what did it have, those Metroid games, Resident Evil 4 , a couple of Mario games? It did well enough, but compared to the PS2 (and Xbox , I guess) the GameCube was sorta a disappointment. Granted, comparing any other video game system to the PS2 is like comparing a light bulb to the sun, but you can only beat what’s put in front of you. Wii ! Yup, Nintendo got tired of the hardware race, so it slapped a Bluetooth sensor bar to white shelled GameCube, called it Wii, then sat back and let the money a-roll in. It completely changed gaming. Now, rather than relying upon the “hardcores” to buy the latest Earthbound , Nintendo could convince Grandma and Grandpa, and your girlfriend, to play Wii Sports till their arms fall off. You’ll note that it took Sony and Microsoft a few years before they realized, “Hey, this motion control business is quite nifty. Maybe we should get in on it?” And they have! I have no time for motion control—you can pry my mouse and keyboard from my cold, dead hands~!—but clearly there’s money to be made here. If Sony and Microsoft can’t make money selling Fling Paint , then there’s no money to publish things like God of War and Fable . So this 3DS thing (here’s the full English press release )… Nintendo describes it as letting you play games “with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” As someone who wears glasses—I’m blind as a bat, and nowhere near as cuddly—, let me be the nine millionth to say “Obrigado!” The 3D TVs at CES were largely pants, but I did get to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in 3D (thanks to some sort of Nvidia trickery ) a few weeks ago. It didn’t blow my mind or anything, but if given the option, provided it’s affordable—I’m not buying a $1,000 monitor and glasses and a new video card!—then why not? Nothing wrong, per se, with a little added depth as I try to left-click over a Bad Guy’s face. The 3DS, which should come out around this time next year, will be backwards compatible with your current DS library. My DS library is quite small ( Chrono Trigger and those Final Fantasy remakes), so I could give a toss about backwards compatibility, but I’m sure there’s those of you who have more than a few games, games that you wouldn’t want to “lose” when upgrading to the 3DS. Upgrading may not even be the right word, since the 3DS is totally new hardware. It’s not like going from the DS Lite to the DSi , or from the DSi to the DSi XL . The point is, this is Nintendo saying, “Hi guys! Remember how we made motion control cool, bringing it to the masses? We’re going to do the same thing with 3D now. Kthxbye!” And now we wait for Sony to announce a 3D PSP of some sort…
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Big news from the Japanese video game world today: Nintendo announced [JP, PDF] they will launch a successor to the DS/DSi for the next fiscal year (which begins next month in Japan and ends in March 2011). And what sounds particularly cool so far about the Nintendo 3DS is that the new portable device won’t require any special glasses for users to see the 3D images, according to Nintendo. Details are scarce at the moment (no price, no specs, no pics), but what’s confirmed so far is that “3DS” is just the tentative name of the device. It will be backwards compatible to conventional DS/DSi games (meaning it will have 2 cameras again) and is sure to hit Japanese stores first. Just as a reminder, Nintendo will release their new handheld, the DSi XL, on March 28 in the US . Nintendo also said they will give us more details about the DS sucessor at the E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles in June. Now let’s just hope the 3DS won’t be another Virtual Boy …
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Nicholas here, from the past communicating to the future! (The site is all messed up, so I probably wrote these words several hours before you’re reading them. It’s like a Metal Gear Time Paradox or something.) Nintendo has said it will release the DSi XL on March 28 for $190. It’s pretty much just a slightly bigger DSi, coming with three games in Brain Age Express, Math and Brain Age Express: Arts & Letters, and Photo Clock. If you want to compare it to the DL Lite, then you could say it has a 93 percent larger screen. But why would you compare it to the DS Lite? The point is, it’s 10 days away. via Techland , which has a much better server than good ol’ CrunchGear. What are you gonna do?
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When Nintendo first unveiled Metroid Prime , fans were skeptical (if not downright apeshit). For a 2D adventure game based on exploration, how could it possibly work in first person? Long story short, Metroid Prime was pretty much universally loved upon release, and now that the Metroid Prime trilogy has gone on to become something of a classic series, all is forgiven. And when Nintendo announced that it had handed off development of the latest Metroid game, Metroid: Other M to Team Ninja, many fans were, once again, walking around with clenched fists. But it was working so well in first person! And early videos showed the game looking much more action oriented. And Samus actually talks in the game. Why would Nintendo let this happen! Thankfully, things have calmed down since Nintendo has shown off more of the game, and the Other M’s 2D to 3D gameplay, along with a weird-yet-interesting NES/pointer control scheme — sans Nunchuk — seems to be whetting appetites something fierce. (Mine, anyway.) In a talk with IGN , Metroid producer Yoshio Sakamoto talked more about the NES style control and lack of Nunchuk integration, saying that “…with the team I’ve been working with, we’ve been making the Metroid series in 2D up to this point. Even though we’ve been looking for a way to control Samus in 3D, we wanted to achieve the feeling that you had when Samus was in 2D. We decided that the traditional D-pad for movement plus jumping and shooting on buttons was the most appropriate control scheme for this direction. The second reason, and let me preface this by saying I don’t think bad games use the nunchuk because there are a lot of great games that do, there’s a certain image created with the nunchuk, it’s a bit of a barrier in accessibility because it’s a “different” control. The nunchuk I think is more appropriate for core audiences. At the same time, I feel that showing people a 3D game where you can control it using the remote really does stir the imagination, they’ll think “How’s it possible to control the character using the sideways remote in 3D?” I also think it’s attractive to those who grew up playing games using this kind of control.” In some ways, this does seem like the logical evolution of the series: blending its 2D roots with some of the innovations of the Prime saga. Hopefully, they can pull it off. But I have one request: Please, Metroid Other M, tell me mid-game if I haven’t done or explored enough to get a good ending. I can’t invest another 20 hours in a Metroid game just to see the back of Samus for 0.37 seconds and then watch the credits roll.
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