E3: Nintendo booth tour, 3DS wows crowds

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If you thought lines to see Microsoft’s Kinect at E3 were bad, brace yourself before venturing over to Nintendo’s section.

Chained to the wrists of booth babes (a staple of the video game expo) and in rows set on several king-sized tables in the back of Nintendo’s exhibit in the Los Angeles Convention Center, the 3DS hand-held game system is drawing the largest groups of people we’ve seen yet. Each person is hoping to get a few minutes with the device before it hits stores next year.

Perhaps that’s because no widely available appliance is capable of producing the sort of three-dimensional effect Nintendo has pulled off with the gadget without requiring the player to wear goofy glasses.

To see it on the 3DS, you need to look straight on at the top display (the bigger of the two on the device, and the only one with 3-D), or else you’re staring at a blurry screen. That’s the limitation of stereoscopic 3-D without the glasses. It’s not hard to do, but if you frequently turn your head between game battles, to chat with someone or glance at the TV, you have to consciously reset yourself in front of the screen.

The 3-D elements, with characters in the foreground and a sense of depth in the virtual world, are just as you’d expect if you’ve seen ‘Avatar’ or a one-off movie at Disneyland. The effect is less pronounced on such a small screen. Using the depth slider on the side of the 3DS, players can switch to 2-D (and some barely noticeable variants of 3-D), but the added dimension looks to be an improvement, albeit somewhat insignificant.

One of the few games ready for the conference (there were plenty of demo videos), StarFox 64 3D, as Nintendo is calling it, seemed to carry over much of what made the original animals-in-space dogfighter great. The new version looks prettier than the 13-year-old original.

On other units, Nintendo showed tech demonstrations of classic NES games rendered in 3-D. Some (Mike Tyson’s Punch Out) look better than others (Super Mario Bros.).

Kid Icarus: Uprising shows promise, reviving a cult favorite that hasn’t seen a significant update in almost 27 years.

Konami’s demo of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater, though not playable, lets you swing the camera around the environment using the system’s control slider. The graphics look on par with the original Playstation 2 game, no insignificant feat, and it presents some of the most well-thought-out eye-poppers of any demo we saw.

Like its predecessors, the 3DS hand-held gadget has Wi-Fi capabilities built in. It also has three cameras -- two on the back to capture 3-D photographs that can be viewed on the device and one on the front for vanity shots. There’s also an accelerometer and gyroscope, so developers can make twisty-turny puzzles. And of course, more power under the hood, making for noticeably improved visuals.

On Nintendo’s best-selling console, the Japanese company showed plenty of family-friendly distractions (Mario Sports Mix and Wii Party) as well as some major sequels and reboots of old favorites.

Next year’s Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is certainly the most notable of those. The game was designed with the Wii’s motion controls in mind from the start, and those precise movements of the remote translate to sword swipes and puzzles.

A new Metroid shooter was on display as well as a unique platform game called Kirby’s Epic Yarn (not yam), where the marshmallowy hero swings around using a piece of string. GoldenEye 007 and NBA Jam share some things in common with their elders. Donkey Kong Country Returns brings back the hit series from the Super Nintendo, doing for the monkey platform game this holiday season what New Super Mario Bros. did in the last.

The video at the top gives a peek at some of these games and, of course, the new 3DS.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian

Video credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times