After a month and half of waiting and alternatively being told what a great purchase I made or how stupid I was to not wait for the NGP, I finally walked into the local Best Buy store, flashed my ID and credit card and was out of the store clutching my shiny new Nintendo 3DS. No camping in the queue overnight, no trampling crowds, no I-saw-it-first; my first Day-0 purchase turned out to be pretty tame affair thanks to having pre-ordered the hotly anticipated console months in advance.
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While the console launched much earlier in Japan, the US got the chance to do away with its 3D glasses when Nintendo launched the 3DS earlier today. This new handheld boasts of an upper screen that uses stereoscopic 3D to display 3D images that do not need the viewer to wear special glasses to view the 3D effect. Unfortunately, this effect is not visible on video, but prepare to be wowed when you push the 3D slider all the way up and watch the two dimensional “Nintendo 3DS” logo transform into a three dimensional image right in front of you.
I haven’t got a chance to spend as much time as I would have liked with the 3DS, but in the time that I did, the 3D does work as advertised. Instead of things popping up out of the screen, there is depth to them. In-game menu buttons seem to float in space, while panning around the car during car selection in Ridge Racer 3D shows off the car as a 3D model. With the AR cards and games like Face Raiders that come bundled with the box, there is plenty of exploring to do for even those who do not have a 3D game cartridge with them.
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Sadly, like other Nintendo products, the 3DS won’t be released in India officially any time soon, so you’ll have to rely on the grey market to get yours. But rest assured, we at IVG will be doing a lot of that exploration in the coming few days. In the meantime, here’s the unboxing video of the latest addition in our console lineup.
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