Nintendo announces Wii 2

So I guess today Nintendo announced the Wii 2. Sounds like a good idea to me except for one or two things. First of all, the name doesn't follow Nintendo's regular naming scheme for consoles. Until the Wii, they'd always used Nintendo somewhere in the name for the console. The only time they reused the name of their previous console was in the Super Nintendo (SNES). This time, they seem to have followed the pattern set by their competitor, Sony, by just adding a number to the end. Come on Nintendo, couldn't you come up with something original? It sounds like you're just saying, "We too." I'd even settle for it being called the Super Wii over Wii 2.

Actually, I can't really come up with anything else to complain about other than the name, especially since there really aren't that many details about it yet. We will definitely get to hear a lot more about it at E3 this June and then I might have more to say. I've always liked Nintendo, and I'm sure this system won't be a big disappointment, especially since I already have a 3DS and they will probably do some things together.

If you want to read more about it, here is a list of recent blog posts about the announcement: ZDNet, PCMag(talks a little about hardware), 2D-X, T3, NDTV

Update: It appears that the official name of the project from Nintendo is Project Cafe, which is much less silly than the name that is being reported in most of the media.

My 3ds Mii QR code

More about the 3ds

So I recently had someone ask me how the 3D images work on my 3ds. I explained something about the little slots in the screen that direct different pixels to each of your eyes to make things appear to have depth to them. Today I found an interesting article with microscope pictures of the 3ds screen: The 3DS Under a Microscope - Nukezilla. It pretty interesting to me that the bars dividing the slots are that big (in relation to the size of the pixels).

Another thing I noticed about the 3ds is that the aliasing of the 3D shapes seems to be even more exaggerated when the 3D is on. I think that comes from the way that the image is rendered twice from slightly different angles, so there are 2 chances for jaggies on the edges. Where a normal rasterized image only has the chance for aliasing once, the 3ds has aliasing for both eyes, and, in particular, the jaggies don't line up and cause an extra level of visual confusion that isn't there for movie images (because of very aggressive anti-aliasing for computer generated images).

First impressions of the 3ds

So I went and got a 3ds today from Toys R Us. Who knew they were still in business? Anyway, I spent a few minutes playing around with it and I though I could share some of my impressions with you.

The first thing I noticed when I turned it on was that the 3d screen was almost too much, but that was probably because I was moving at the time. After I sat down and adjusted the 3d slider, I felt much better about my 3d experience. For it to work right, you have to hold it kinda close to your face, which may be part of why they recommend taking a break every 30 minutes from the 3d experience.

As far as software goes, the first game I played on it is built in and called Face Raiders. What you do is take a picture of your face first, then you proceed to fire balls to knock floating heads out of the sky. And by that I mean, you turn the device around the world, and it augments reality to show flying heads attacking you. I felt kinda awkward doing this in a public place as I had to get up off my chair to defeat the boss that was behind me. The game worked very well and was very impressive I thought. Augmented reality gaming is probably at its best (for now) in Face Raiders.

Then I tried out AR Games after returning to my car to get the AR cards that I hadn't realized I'd need. AR Games is another set of games that augments reality, but it all based around the card you place on a flat surface. Similar to Face Raiders, you shoot balls at targets, but this time they are objects that seem to spawn from the card that you placed down. It was a really fun game, but again, I felt awkward performing in front of a group of people when I was the only one that could actually see the dragon emerging from the card and trying to scratch my face off. I eventually won and moved on to make myself a Mii.

Similar to the software on the Wii, the 3ds allows you to customize your Miis however you wish, but with a few additional parts. I however chose the other option, to have the Mii be based on a picture. I moved myself to a good location, and took the picture of myself. The generated Mii was acceptable, and as I was told, was a pretty good representation of myself. All in all I've had fun with my 3ds so far and I would recommend it to anyone who has $250 that they don't have anything else to do with.