Oregano

The game is amazing. Single player is amazing, looks great, plays great and just generally is a lot of fun.

Multiplayer... fast, fun and very well balanced. Multiplayer maps are very well designed with multiple paths and vantage points. All weapons are equally useful too from what I've experienced.

Yay, I loved the first two. Absolutely beautiful games.

Wish Frontier the best of luck with Kinectimals too!

nice@ the image.

She certainly does show off vocally even though she said that wasn't what it was about! Didn't know she could sing like that.

I'm getting Goldeneye and probably Black Ops on the 360. I entered the competition for a copy of the Wii Black Ops though.

Yaya, will definitely check it out!

I have entered for this too. I'm getting the mini version unless I can pick up a free copy!

I entered but don't expect to win, I'm not planning on buying it for the Wii but if I can get it for free I'm not turning it down! Woop Woop!

I wonder if we'll actually get a trailer before release?

I want to go to the 'United Sates' one day.

@Xkhaoz: A lot of that had to do with the fact that it was using an engine that wasn't meant for it(the Resi Evil 4 engine). The Wii wouldn't be able to replicate it fully but the difference between DR and Chop Till You Drop isn't solely because of system power(lack of camera for one example).

That's pretty cool.

It was actually developed by Tri-Crescendo. I totally forgot about the game, might pick it up at some point when it's cheap.

@Mickeymac: I wouldn't count on getting them any time soon. Level 5 is making a big deal about owning their IPs and Sony owns both of those... I think the only IP they'll work on that they don't own is Dragon Quest and that's because it made them rich!

I shall have this game soon and I look forward to racing some people.

You guys should pay more attention to the Goldeneye thread in the Wii section. We have all these videos AND more!

@MDee14: No, it's not even a full control scheme. It's just hotkeys.

Will be getting!

@NintendoCoDGamer: That happens for all splitscreen games though because they have to divide resolution, fill rate between the separate little screens.

So what 2011 games are there?

This, Mario Sports Mix, Kirby's Epic Yarn(EU here), Skyward Sword and hopefully some localisations? Could be better but I need to save money for the 3DS anyway!

I was always planning on getting the mini version so yay for me!

I wonder if it'll will be more successful than the retail one.

This game looks suweeeeet!

Something tells me Marvelous is in even worse shape than we thought.

Reminded me of this:

@Swerd_Murd: Nope, MT Framework on the 3DS isn't gimped at all, it uses all the same tools as the PS3/360 and uses techniques that the Wii just plain can not do. HDR, Self shadowing and Normal Maps are examples of stuff the 3DS excels at and aren't possible on the Wii,

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/09/13/3ds_mt_framework_detailed/

Also the 3DS' total resolution, including the bottom screen is still below HD so yes it makes a difference...and again people have played these games at Nintendo's event last week and commented that they look close to Resident Evil 5. Or are Capcom, the Japanese press and Masahiro Sakurai all lying?

EDIT: IGN's comparison(keep in mind the Resi5 shot has more AA because it's shrunk down.
http://dsmedia.ign.com/ds/image/article/112/1124739/3ds-graphics-old-vs-new--20100930095455179.jpg

Apart from the weird greenish filter the screens could probably be passed off as the same game. It's not quite identical but it is close.

I'd rather not have a monthly fee, and a lot of more 'casual' users wouldn't want a monthly fee either. The only other way would be to bump up the cost and the 3DS is already expensive enough.... and that would alienate casual users too.

This might be the best way for now, it probably had an effect on price because they have to set up these partnerships but nowhere close to what 3G would cost.

Hey Namco why don't you start publishing your own bloody games in Europe!

I hope they actually localise Tales of the Abyss 3DS... after all it's already been localised once.

@Slapshot82: Well it doesn't have the raw power of the PS3 but it doesn't need it because of the smaller screensize and resolution, which means less AA is needed, textures can be smaller and if done intelligently you don't even need as many polygons on screen. Resident Evil: Mercenaries 3D contains all the Mercenary levels and Enemies(and probably characters) out of Resident Evil 5 so I think that will be the best point of comparison. I think it's even using the same downscaled assets.

@28: Those reported specs aren't confirmed and there's evidence that contradicts them. Such as the fact they reported it has 1.5gb of internal storage whereas Iwata said the internal NAND is for firmware and built in Apps whilst the SD Card acts as the storage. Not to mention the fact that it can multitask and pull off games like the aforementioned Resident Evil: Revelations which simply could not happen with only 64mbs of RAM.

Additionally we don't have any idea how strong the GPU is, the specs for the PICA jumped massively between 2006 and 2008 and there's another two years of progress then, not to mention we have no idea how many pipelines it has and considering the fact that DMP only recently added proper 3D support to the line(called 3DSquare as well) there's a good chance Nintendo is using a custom built/brand new version of the line.

There's a good chance that it's not as powerful as the iphone 4(which keep in mind costs $600 with a contract) but those rumoured specs are far from concrete and we shouldn't be taking them as gospel. The main issue with what Mark Rein has said is that they(Epic) haven't actually even got a devkit to test it and he himself says he can't verify his claim.

There is a precedent for the 3DS being able to handle PS3/360 engines though with the fact that Capcom we able to port MT Framework in just two months and Foundation 9 have said that their 3DS engine(called Atomic) is built on their Console technology. As I said before though, the issue may not be raw power, it more than likely is the issue of programmability where the 3DS uses fixed functions(which Mark Rein is known for hating anyway) to fully replicate ES2 whilst only having ES1.1.

EDIT: Wow, didn't realise I just wrote an essay.

EDIT2: That reminds me, the first ever demo we saw for the 3DS' GPU is actually pulling off all the same techniques as Epic's Citadel, and more such as a dynamic lighting, it's just not a big area like Citadel(which is why it might be misleading).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-xxUyJvQQ

@slapshot82: There is footage of both of the Resident Evil games though, and screenshots. All three of Capcom's games(that we've seen) look shockingly close to their console counterparts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_BSCAGsxy8&feature=related&t=0m31s
Or for the gifs of Revelations:
http://www.abload.de/img/rer1ex8c.gif
http://www.abload.de/img/rer2mbsl.gif

It's not actually Epic's Games that we'd want on the 3DS, it's the actual engine because nearly all developers are experienced in it and it would help a lot with getting developers up to speed on the 3DS. I don't even think it's the actual effects that are important but the way the engine is set up.

Also it's obvious that they don't really intend to try and get it running on the 3DS, otherwise they'd have a dev kit now. The dev kits are readily available now and all you have to do is apply for them. Considering even indie developers have got their hands on dev kits there's no excuse for Epic not to.

@Mickeymac: I think that may be for the best, hate what they did to that once great franchise.

@Mickeymac: Wasn't Unreal Tournament 3 an FPS, which came out in 2008(?).

All the Citadel demo has on the 3DS is bigger texture resolution. All the lighting effects are prebaked and there is nothing dynamic in it and despite having no game logic or character models it still has a crappy framerate.

Meanwhile Capcom has been able to port MT Frameworks, which is an engine at least on par with UE3, to the 3DS and implement HDR, Self Shadowing, object based motion blur etc. and they have an actual game going on with a stable framerate. People who played the game said it looks nearly exactly like Resident Evil 5.

The 3DS could likely replicate the Citadel demo, but it would have lower resolution textures... which wouldn't be as noticeable on the smaller(and lower res) screen anyway.

The problem Mark Rein has is that UE3 is built only to run on ES2 whereas the 3DS' GPU is ES1.1 with the Maestro function having easy to implement, fixed functions that replicate ES2.

I've already seen the secret ending and it pretty much indicates that KH3D is indeed KH3 or a worthless spin off that does little to further the overarching story. I'm going to go with the latter.

@slapshot82: how did you lose it exactly?

Ouch, I really liked the look of this.

@Marvelousmoo

All that footage is from splitscreen multiplayer, not four lots of one player. The game will look inherently worse in splitscreen because the screen is being renders at a lower resolution. So in four player splitscreen instead of having 640x480 for each screen you have 320X240(which is the same as the 3DS' bottom screen).

@5: You could say it will be crap.

Also this isn't built on the COD engine, it's built on Eurocom's in-house engine - the same one that powered Dead Space: Extraction.

Looks awesome anyway.

@Corbie: But Yuji Naka no longer works on Sonic, he left Sonic Team a couple of years ago. Sega already confirmed Sonic would make an appearance anyway.

Yay, looks awesome! Picking this up day 1(hopefully)!

@tbd: I think it can, they haven't shown it yet, but they've shown that the OS is always active and I think spotpass and streetpass are intended to be always active, except when you don't want it to.

@James: It depends how they do it, if they hide the Firmware data within games then they could deprive people of some of the best games, wireless connectivity and all the download stuff(including tv shows and movies). You'd have to cripple your 3DS just to pirate some games and that won't be worth it for most people.

You can turn of wireless by the way guys, it's simply a switch on the side.

I said a long time ago that the auto-updates would be used to combat piracy and whilst it won't eliminate it, it should go a long way to getting rid of casual piracy by making it inconvenient which it is definitely not on the DS.

The arcade standby is a really revealing feature. It's already been confirmed that you can enter the OS whilst playing 3DS games and use other apps and this seems to imply that it can wirelessly seek players whilst just fighting which means the system must have some decent RAM.

Combining that with the fact that the 3DS doesn't have accessible on-board storage(instead using SD cards) I think we could probably assume that IGN's rumoured specs were BS...

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Ugh those Splinter Cell screenshots are really, really poor. Driver looks pretty good though.

Tecmo Koei and Nintendo are evidently best buds now.

Ooo thank you, will definitely purchase then.

Will you be hanging out in the EU thread helping people like with the US thread? That was awesome of you.

Doesn't seem too bad, Zenonia is good at least.

Ooo, I want this game. I wonder if they tweaked it though, it was apparently brutally difficult.

@Stuffgamer1: That's because it wasn't made by Akitoshi Kawazu and the remake of SaGa 2 for the DS was supposedly even more difficult and it looks like they're bringing SaGa 3 in line with the first two.