Hi everyone, hope you have all been well over the winter and avoided getting sick as much as possible!Embarrassing fact: I haven't blogged in so long that I couldn't remember the URL to my own blog, so I tried to Google it, but my blog doesn't show up on Google for some reason, even when I type in the exact title of it (which I wasn't 100% sure that I completely remembered). I couldn't even remember what my blog was supposed to be about until I read the description (over on the right hand side column). So, I used to review Nintendos games. Now I think I might review a Nintendos product!
This winter I bought David a Nintendo 3DS because I'm pretty awesome like that. And also because I suspected that if I bought David a 3DS I could get his old, regular-type DS as a hand-me-down, a ploy which has totally worked. And also because I thought it might be cool to play Nintendogs in 3D (although I haven't gotten around to that yet because I'm still pretty attached to my 2D Nintendogs and I don't think I can handle another one at this point in time).
To go with the 3DS I also bought Street Fighter and Pokemon (I can't remember if it's Pokemon Black or Pokemon White). The Pokemon game came with a cool 3D Pokedex feature, which for the longest time, I used to call a "three-Pokemon-dexter". The best part of having a 3DS is probably having this 3D Pokedex, which regularly gets updated with new Pokemon. Anyway, moving on now (because I don't want to alienate any of you readers who aren't into the Pokemon franchise)...
One negative thing I'd have to say about the Nintendo 3DS is that it uses a different battery charger to the regular-type DS, which is of a minor inconvenience because both of us have regular-type DS chargers at home so no matter whose place we're staying at, there is never a problem with running out of battery. It's also different to the regular-type DS (that I'm used to) in that the power button, volume button, and stylus are all in different places. This means that I often randomly grope the side of the 3DS to get the stylus out. But I'm sure the men at Nintendo had their reasons for making these changes.
Another negative is that the 3D vision only works if your head is at exactly the right angle in relation to the screen, which means that if David is playing and I want to look over his shoulder, the display will be stuffed up and blurry for at least one of us. However this is mitigated by a handy function with which you can use to turn the 3D feature off.
The third negative is that there is a feature on the 3DS that takes a photo of your face and turns it into a Mii, which I initially thought was pretty cool, until it turned my photo into a really ugly Mii. But Miis don't resemble humans anyway, and I suspect that any person who actually gets a decent looking Mii out of it looks pretty freaky in real life!
Anyway the positive points are that the 3DS comes in a rather fetching electric blue cover and it provides us with hours of mobile entertainment.
On another note: I just played Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (Professor Layton 3) and I can't wait for the next instalment in this series! The story was quite moving, but I won't tell you in which parts exactly, because I know that not everybody enjoys spoilers as much as I do! I was pretty chuffed with myself because I managed to find every single puzzle in the game (in Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I couldn't find every single puzzle and had to resort to Internet walkthroughs to find the last couple that I'd missed).
The Professor Layton storyline was impeccably well written and nicely balanced and interspersed with puzzles. I found the difficulty level of the puzzles to be quite good (challenging but not impossible to solve). The worst puzzles for me are the sliding puzzles, I have very poor spatial awareness and can't do things like read maps or tell my left from my right, but I found that even the spatial-type puzzles were easy to solve with Hints (I suppose I'm a little older than the target audience for these games though).
However, the puzzles were sometimes a bit repetitive in that many relied on the same kind of trick (e.g. the number 6 can be flipped upside down to become a 9, etc). But I must say that in this Professor Layton game there were fewer "gimmicky puzzles" than in either of the previous Professor Layton games (by 'gimmicky puzzle' I mean trick questions).
Anyway, hope you have enjoyed my reviews! Tell me what you thought of the 3DS or Professor Layton! Next blog post I might review some Xbox games like Portal or L. A Noire. Until then, peace out everybody!
Ooh, very interesting. Unfortunately with my current wages of pretty much nothing, buying a 3DS is probably going to be out of the question until a few months before the next DS (the one that will most probably be able to distort the space-time continuum) comes out.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I've only played the first Layton game, but I thought it was gorgeous and enjoyed every moment of it. The story was kind of meh, though, so the thought of there being a Layton game with a decent story makes me kind of excited, I have to say. I look forward to playing it in the next million years or so, when I'm able to afford a 3DS.
The gift of a 3DS was pretty awesome :D The three-pokemon-dexter is a cool little feature, and I guess if you were desperate to find out some stats on the go it's good for that too. I'm exceedingly impressed about finding all the puzzles, I'm told (by you) that I didn't actually find them all, so congratulations. Don't forget Legend of Zelda 3D, that's pretty epic too! You should definitely review Portal 2, more specifically the co-op mode, I'm sure that will be quite revealing :P
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