Heyyy, a new blog by me, after 20 years. I definitely check Dtoid every day, but university and work just don't leave me as much time as I'd like to play and do stuff. I just got a 3DS a few days ago (Cosmo Black, like a boss) and every day it reminds me why it is that I will always love Nintendo, no matter what. It is like a little magic box that keeps giving every time you open it, I suppose like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Today I was checking the 3DS Sound app just because I hadn't checked it much yet. I then proceeded to play with it for like half an hour. Nintendo can take something as simple as a music player and make it into an incredible experience. What got me was the fact that you can change the pitch of the music by dragging the stylus on the screen and on one setting it makes the songs sound like they are being sung by a tall, black man. Lady Gaga songs heard that way are 20 times better. Then I started checking the visualizer settings and realized you can play with some of them. One is kind of like the bastard child of Audiosurf and Star Fox and you can even move the little ship with the circle pad (the circle pad is one of my favorite parts of the hardware, but that's something for another time). You can also use the triggers to play percussion along with the music, and when you do using the "Star Fox" visualizer the ship actually shoots lasers and you destroy some blocks that appear. This looks AMMAAAAAAAZING in 3D and it makes the wait for Star Fox 3D even harder.

Street Pass is another surprise. I always take the 3DS with me now to see if I get lucky and, surprisingly, I've had a couple of tags already. I even got the Mario hat for my Mii (yay!).



Here's the little guy without the hat.

Spot Pass is great and the realization of the vision they had with WiiConnect24 (we all know how that ended). Every day I turn on my 3DS and get a new costume for DOA and as more games keep coming out hopefully this will turn even better. Friend codes are finally decent (even though I really didn't mind using them on the Wii). You can finally see what your friends are doing online and hopefully with next week's update (or at least sometime soon) we get messaging features. Nintendo is always a bit slow in doing things but I know that when they deliver they rarely disappoint.

I haven't even got to the AR Games. The very first time I played a 3DS was when I accompanied my friend to get his launch unit. I wanted to check Face Raiders 'cause it honestly didn't sound too good. As soon as I started shooting myself in the face and moving the 3DS around the parking lot like an idiot the Nintendo magic bitchslapped me in the face. I even moved my face when the faces started attacking me as if they were actually gonna hit me, laughing afterwards in surprise cause I never expected I would actually do that. The 3D effect is quite something when you first experience it. As I keep playing everyday the effect becomes natural and not quite as striking as it was the first time, but when you turn it off you feel like you're missing something. I can't really go back to playing 3DS games with the 3D off (unless I'm desperately trying to save battery life). Even taking 3D pictures with the camera is quite enjoyable, even if the picture quality is fairly bad. I've taken pictures of the most mundane things just because the 3D effect makes them look awesome.

There's a million other things you could say about the machine, and there's barely even any good games yet. I can't wait to see what other surprises Nintendo throws our way and I'm hella excited for next week. We couldn't get into E3 itself (dammit) but our nice PR lady did get us invitations to the Nintendo presentation (shameless plug to my website www.latinogamers.net). I'm soooooo flipping excited about Project Wii Cafe Stream 2 thingy and Super Mario 3DS, Zelda and whatever they got in store. Just being able to go there kind of takes away the pain of not getting into E3. There's always next year, though.

Anyone wanna be my friend, my code is 5026-4502-7206. I have DOA Dimensions and Pokemon Black for online play and will definitely get RE Mercenaries soon after it comes out.