It took me over half a year to finally succumb to Nintendo’s spell and buy a Nintendo 3DS. It was a wise decision.

The Nintendo 3DS was released on March 27 of this year and is the latest in Nintendo’s long line of handheld gaming devices. This honoured tradition started back in 1989 with the Game Boy and has gone through various iterations over the years such as the Game Boy Color in 1998, the Game Boy Advance in 2001 and the DS in 2004.

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The Nintendo 3DS is an impressive little gaming system. Its most obvious and gimmicky feature is its 3D screen, which allows the player to see 3D images without the need for 3D glasses. While there are plenty of grumblers out there constantly bemoaning the use of 3D in movies who likely dread the idea of this current trend invading video games, the presence of 3D in video gaming is actually logical and extremely impressive, especially for handheld gaming.

The largest problem that handheld gaming currently has, and likely will always have, is that the game screen is too small. There’s no way a four-inch screen will ever match up to a 40-inch High Definition television. Luckily, 3D solves some of this problem. The most useful aspect of 3D is that it gives the game depth.

While composition can provide a lot of depth in an image on its own, 3D expands this depth in ways mere composition cannot. It makes the screen seem so much larger because you’re looking into it, not at it. Thus, with the 3DS, it feels like you are looking into a window instead of just staring at a screen.

3D does have a few drawbacks to it. You have to hold it straight-on, about a foot from your face for it to work properly. It drains your battery life, which is already short, and dims the image. But the benefits of depth of field and visual complexity easily outweigh the limitations. It really does make the screen seem larger and make the images far more interesting than they are without it.

However, even if you do not like 3D or cannot appreciate it because of some vision issues, 3D is not the only aspect that recommends the 3DS. You can turn off or reduce the 3D using the slider on the right side of the system and by doing so you don’t reduce any of the system’s graphical capabilities, which are quite an improvement over the original DS.

The original DS graphics were comparable to the Nintendo 64. While the 3DS graphics are not quite at Wii levels, they are a vast improvement on the 64-like graphics of the DS, and they’ll only get better as designers refine them and push the system to its full potential.

There is more texture to the image and the objects are more rounded, shying away from the 64’s blockiness. The colour palette is wider and more vibrant. Everything is sharp. When comparing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on 3DS and N64, the 3DS version is without the blurriness that made for major headaches on the N64.

The system also has an abundance of special features, which are quite neat and an added incentive to purchase the system. There are augmented reality games that take advantage of objects physically in the room with you. By placing a small card on an object and reading the card with your system’s camera, holographic creations appear on-screen that you can interact with. As well, the camera used for the augmented reality games is also capable of taking 3D pictures.

The 3DS also comes with an Internet browser, access to a Virtual Console similar to the Wii’s where you can buy older systems’ games to play on the 3DS and access to the digital store where you can access a variety of applications.

But really, the big incentives when deciding to buy a system are the games. It’s fortunate then that the 3DS has some of the best games ever, remade for handheld use.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the Citizen Kane of video games. It is considered by many to be the greatest game ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D has better graphics and uses the system’s touch screen and gyroscopic controls. It’s also exactly the same adventure it has always been, except with slight gameplay adjustments to compensate for being handheld. Thus, it’s ultimately the more polished, portable version of the best game ever made.

Starfox 64 3D is another remake of an N64 classic. Even more than Ocarina of Time, Starfox 64 lends itself to handheld gaming. It operates like an arcade game with its fast-paced flying missions and is perfect for the short bursts of hyperactive gameplay so typical of handheld gaming. The graphics are better, the voice work has been redone and online multiplayer has been added into the mix.

Both of these games were classics on the N64 and it’s likely that many prospective owners of the 3DS already own them. However, the benefits of the 3DS and graphical improvements make these games worth owning even if you already have the original versions. The price alone is worth it to see these games in a new dimension, playable anywhere you carry your 3DS.

People turned off by the whole concept of handheld gaming will not be won over by the 3DS, but for gamers who are curious about gaming in 3D or who have always wanted to see fancier versions of their favourite N64 games, the Nintendo 3DS is well worth owning. And things will only improve from here.

The 3DS is only half a year old. November promises the release of Super Mario 3D Land and December has Mario Kart 7. Seeing what games Nintendo has in store for the system only proves that the best years of the 3DS are still to come.

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Photo: Raisa Pezderic/The Sheaf