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Battery woes, better health, phantom 3D: A month with Nintendo's 3DS

Five nuisances reveal themselves

Battery woes, better health, phantom 3D: A month with Nintendo's 3DS
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3DS

The Nintendo 3DS has had quite an impact on the Pocket Gamer team. When we're not having StreetPass competitions, we're blasting through excellent games like Street Fighter and Pilotwings.

As we wrote in our 3DS hardware review, "we wouldn't be at all surprised to see Nintendo’s domination of the portable arena continue for a good while yet."

Of course, every piece of hardware has a honeymoon period, and eventually cracks start to show. We've had our little stereoscopic 3D beauty for a month now, and while we're still having a lot of fun there are niggles to address.

Here are the top five elements of the Nintendo 3DS that are giving us the most grief.

Seeing 3D where there isn't 3ds rub eyes

The stereoscopic 3D effect takes some time to get used to, but soon your eyes become comfortable with it and even start to love it a little.

Unfortunately, they like the effect so much that they sometimes decide to take it with them. Several times after playing on my 3DS I've turned it off to do some proper work only to find words leaping out at me from my monitor's screen.

It's an eerie experience. No-one ever really questions how their eyes work, or worries about messing their sight up, so the first time this happens it's a little worrying. It makes us wonder whether the stereoscopic 3D is actually doing our eyes harm.

Not only that, but we've witnessed a couple of strange effects in other places. Earlier this week, I spotted a fly that appeared to be sitting on the point in mid-air.

After blinking a couple of times, my eyes came back into focus to reveal that the fly was in fact attached to the wall just behind where I'd been staring. Freaky stuff.

Button shifting nintendo dsi

Something which started out as a minor nuisance has slowly, over the course of the month, become rather frustrating.

Why, oh why, Nintendo, did you move the Start button?

On the original DS, DS Lite and DSi, the Start button is situated just below the A, B, X and Y buttons. On the 3DS, the Power button occupies that spot, while the Start button takes centre stage right below the bottom screen.

This has led to us pressing the Power button several times to pause the game. As you can probably imagine, this isn't a good thing.

Fortunately, you need to hold the button for a second to make it switch to the 'power off' screen - but still, it can be highly annoying.

The bottom three buttons - Select, Home, and Start - don't feel like they're in the right place either. We wager that the Select button will barely be used in games due to its positioning (although, having said that, it's a very under-used button in general).

Battery life low battery 3ds

From the moment we heard about it, the four-hour battery life had us worried. Being the optimistic chaps that we are, however, we decided to give it the benefit of the doubt until we'd properly tested it out.

After a month of play, we can confirm that the battery life is just as bad as it sounds.

Not only do the stereoscopic 3D effects drain the power like there's no tomorrow, but even without the effects turned on it still lasts barely any time at all.

Take, for example, my recent trip from Manchester to London and back again on the train - a round trip that lasts five hours in total.

My Nintendo 3DS conked out after four hours, which is terrible in itself. What makes it even worse is that I wasn't even using the 3D effects. I was playing Pokemon Black the entire time.

Considering the Nintendo DSi can last for around eight hours playing the same game, this is quite a backwards step.

Blinking 'ell blinking lights

Just below the 3D effects slider is the StreetPass notification light. It blinks or glows to let you know that certain events are currently occuring.

The majority of these are genuinely useful. A solid green light means you've received a StreetPass, and we all squeal with glee every time this happens.

A solid blue represents a SpotPass, while a blinking red light signifies a low battery.

However, the light also has another use. A blinking yellow light lets you know that a friend has come online.

Now, not that I'm boasting, but with over 20 friends registered on my 3DS this blinking light can become rather tiresome.

In fact, since the majority of these friends play a decent amount on their 3DS handhelds, it means that the light blinks frequently. Perhaps three times an hour on average.

This is far more distracting that it should be. Imagine you're fully immersed in a game and suddenly a light starts blinking for no useful reason whatsoever.

Hopefully a future update will allow us to choose when the light blinks and when it doesn't.

Play Coin panic walking

One feature that we've all been enjoying at Pocket Gamer is StreetPass Quest. A simple RPG it may be, but there's a surprising depth to it, generating some competitive behaviour in Pocket Gamer Towers.

Gathering enough Play Coins each day in order to take part has been keeping us fit, too. Going out for a short walk to rack up the coins must be doing us some good.

But there's a problem that's been putting a bit of a downer on play - the Play Coin daily cap. Only ten coins can be collected each day, which only allows us five adventurers in StreetPass Quest.

Not only that, but these ten coins are awarded for walking 1,000 steps. This is essentially 10 minutes' walk, hence any walking you do after this goes unrewarded

We feel this is rather tight, and hope Nintendo chooses to extend the maximum number of coins you can receive in a day in future, especially given that future games will also want to eat up our coins in return for certain modes and features.

Mike Rose
Mike Rose
An expert in the indie games scene, Mike comes to Pocket Gamer as our handheld gaming correspondent. He is the author of 250 Indie Games You Must Play.