Nintendo's media brief today revealed a lot about the
3DS, and that trailer John
posted earlier showed off some of its features. Well now Gonintendo has helpfully compiled a
factsheet on the new portable with all the important info for your reading pleasure.
As far as the Japanese release, the 3DS will be hitting on February 26th for an MSRP of 25000 Yen, or roughly $300. That does seem pretty steep, but it's important to remember that Japanese and American prices aren't exactly analogous because of inflation. It's a little awkward that, at least in Japan, the 3DS is about $100 more than the Wii, but we are talking about hardware that's around 5 years younger. The 3DS comes bundled with more than just the unit, too--that spiffy charge base from the trailer comes in the box, along with a 2GB SD card and some software preloaded onto the 3DS's internal storage.
My main concern is the price right now, but to be honest the 3DS looks far superior to the Wii in most respects, especially with its vastly improved online infrastructure and its augmented reality and social networking abilties. It'll also include many of the features field-tested on the Wii, like a Mii channel that can import your existing Miis or create new ones from 3D pictures, and a Virtual Console for Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games.
The 3DS is one of the more complete hardware packages we've seen from Nintendo in a long while: geared toward a broad variety of games, packing an impressive suite of hardware and software features and supported with a rich launch window library. Supposedly it'll be out in America and Europe sometime in March, and the wait just got a whole lot harder for a portable junkie like me.
