I've been saving up for some time now and just got back from a week-long trip to find the 3DS had released. Just yesterday I traded in my DS Lite and bought a 3DS for around $200. I'll give you guys my thoughts on it in case you've been curious about it and maybe considering purchasing one yourself.

What I like:

My initial response (and the initial response to everyone I showed the 3DS to at school today) to the 3D effect of the 3DS was summed up as something like "Woah". As someone who has never experienced 3D gaming before, I found it to be quite incredible. The 3D effect adds a whole new experience to the games themselves. It doesn't hurt your eyes like the movie theater might, and it feels completely natural. No glasses required, it's just there. Very impressive and a lot of fun. The first game I purchased was Pilotwings. I purchased that game for three reasons: it utilizes the Miis, it has a lot of scenery and moving around to really show off the 3D effect, and I loved the original for the SNES.

The pre-installed software is a lot to toy around with and also loads of fun. Having bought Pilotwings, I quickly found out that you can take pictures on your hang glider. The pictures display in the photo gallery in 3D. It's actually fun taking scenery pictures and seeing them there. You can also make Miis which is just like the Wii version more or less.

One really cool feature I had to see were the augmented reality cards. I must say, the augmented reality is actually loads of fun. It's incredibly easy, but a lot of fun. It's also a blast taking pictures of your Miis or Nintendo characters posing on your dresser.

The graphics are excellent compared to the DS. I'd say they're somewhere inbetween the PS1 and Gamecube. Nothing like the NGP will be, but still very nice to look at.

The overall design of the 3DS hardware itself is very nice and comfortable. It looks very sexy (I bought the Cosmo Black one, by the way). The analog stick is also very comfortable, far more than the D-pad. There's a camera looking at your to take pictures of yourself as well as two cameras on the outside of the 3DS to take 3D pictures and play things like the augmented reality in 3D.

What I dislike:

I don't dislike very much about the 3DS, but there are a couple of things I can complain about:

The stylus is actually positioned on the top-left. Since most people use it with their right hand, it's extremely uncomfortable to reach to the top and over to get it. The DS Lite had a far superior design, in my opinion, being on the side and on the right.

My biggest problem with the 3DS is the backwards compatibility with DS games. When just popping in a DS game and playing it, it comes out very distorted and blurry. To make it crisp and clear, you need to press and load Start and Select as the game is loading. This brings it down to a 1x1 pixel resolution. In that mode, however, it's very very small compared to the actual DSes before the 3DS. I was very disappointed by this.



Overall, I highly recommend the 3DS to anybody interested. It's greatly worth the $250 in my opinion. The 3D is absolutely spectacular, it's like entering an entirely new world. The 3D effect itself is definitely worth checking out even if it's just viewing a demo at your local GameStop. With everything else, though, the 3DS is definitely a system worth getting especially with all of the great titles coming out on it later on.

I give the 3DS a 9/10