My Diary. By Chris Charlton, age 27 and a half.

My 3DS pre-order form. Riveting, I know.

Friday, February 25, 2011: DAY ZERO

Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 8/10

Exciting times, exciting times. Tomorrow is the big day -- the launch of the Nintendo 3DS. It's the first console I've actually pre-ordered to buy on day one since the PlayStation 2, which is more a damning indictment of my financial status at the time of other console launches (or testament to cooler heads prevailing) than anything else. As is always the case with hardware launches, the Internet shall explode tomorrow in a deluge of unboxing videos, pictures of midnight lines, and 'Is it good or is it crap?' so-called features.

This isn't quite one of those; it's a week-one diary designed to chronicle my first few days' thoughts and to give a broader impression than immediate pieces can convey. That and the Bic Camera store I have my preorder with doesn't open until 10 a.m. tomorrow, and I've work in the morning, so nyet. Will I maintain my high level of excitement for the device throughout the week? Will the buyer's remorse kick in by Wednesday? Read on! 

In the meantime, quick turns on demo units have vindicated my decision to pick up Super Street Fighter 4 with the device. Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask looks very pretty, but my barely functional Japanese isn't up to task. Famitsu, meanwhile, would have me get Nintendogs Plus Cats with the console after giving it the highest launch lineup score of 38/40, but then they gave genital warts 38 in their social disease round-up issue, so who knows.

Saturday, February 26, 2011: DAY ONE

Arbitrary 3DS excitement rating: 10/10

6:00 a.m.

As I rapidly type before heading into work for the morning, I'm reminded of November 24, 2000 and the 17-year-old me picking up his U.K., day-one PlayStation 2 from Electronics Boutique (when it still was called that) in Cambridge. The shop had opened at midnight; I was there at half-past eight to pick the machine up before school. I asked the bleary-eyed assistant whether there'd been many people on hand at the dawning of this brave, new, video-gaming era. "Just a couple," came the drowsy and somewhat surly reply. Not the frenzied excitement of Oxford Circus then.

In a similar manner, the still large city of Fujisawa doesn't warrant the big launch day bustle of Yurakucho and Akihabara one hour away. Midnight would have been fun, but this is a more dignified affair. 

7:00 p.m.

It's mine, all mine! After an agonizing wait behind a massive line of two, I picked up my hardware. Real-world commitments being in place (owing to Sod's law, 3DS has arrived on an annoyingly busy weekend for me), I elect to limit my first experiences to what's inside the big box.

What's inside the big box is a surprisingly weighty tome of a manual. Sod that. Except! Let's have a quick look at those hi-larious Nintendo health and safety diagrams first (see right).

Ah, Nintendo. It's good to be back in your mothering arms.

Booting up the system leads to a brief set up -- the price we pay for our technologically advanced world of having to register absolutely everything and assign name tags to inanimate objects. My 3DS is now "Chris' 3DS" and rests on my super-duper Ikea table, Gavin.

A quick 3D test (left) and a hop, skip, and jump over network settings (I'm wired in my apartment and see no point to connect until May's shop-enabling firmware update, anyway) and things get underway.

There's a pleasing amount of stuff preloaded onto the firmware itself. The home screen is fairly slick and can be accessed at any time. At the top of the screen are icons to change the orientation of the main panes underneath (which will become necessary if you ever download anything) alongside some miniapps for looking at your friends list, writing memos, and using the Internet browser (though not until the firmware update hits). These are all accessible while keeping a game running in the background, but the "main" applications in Wii-esque channels underneath do not multitask.

Heading down the line of these and after the option to play the game currently inserted, there's your 3D camera. Self-explanatory stuff: two snaps and "that looks nice" remarks and on with the show.

Nintendo 3DS Sound is the onboard music player/visualizer. It's hard to see anyone using their 3DS as a music player, but you can if you want to while some little birdies fly around and chirp on the top screen. You can also use the mic to drop some rhymes while using the shoulder buttons to provide a beat if you so desire. Why you would is anyone's guess, but hey, maybe it's for, y'know, "the kids."

The Mii Studio is brilliant. Miis -- and Xbox avatars for that matter -- do play somewhat with my character-creation-loving mentality honed through years of wrestling games, but making a virtual you from a camera snapshot is quick and the sort of thing I can see inflicting on every friend I meet for the next month or so or until I've accumulated enough punches in the face. Such threats of physical violence did come from my girlfriend if I ever posted a quick Mii snap here, but you can judge the slightly dubious accuracy of the app with my ugly mug as a guide (left).

Not sure it's any more accurate than a roll of the dice, but one presumes that's not the point -- the point being to harass friends, relatives, and random people; generate their Miis; and then laugh mercilessly at what ugly, ugly freaks they are.

The prelaunch commercials for 3DS here have been dreadful. Using the same template that Wii adverts have been using for years, celebrities play around with the thing while a disembodied voice asks what they think, and they mumble pleasantries. No gameplay footage...no attempt to make the device desirable. You'd think, though, that miles of cheesy footage could be made from Mii studio -- and the same goes for the augmented reality (AR) games. 

Perhaps it's a sign of Nintendo learning from tripe like Wii Play that the AR games collection is hosted on the device rather than provided at an extra charge. It makes the thirty minutes (and no more) you will spend with it a far more pleasant experience.

Not having messed much with augmented reality on the iPhone, putting the question-marked card on the table and seeing a dragon spring out of it to shoot at is kind of cool. When the table in front of the camera warps and stretches to create an island in a lava lake that you're required to shoot a boulder across in a billiards based distraction, it's hard not to emit an amused and impressed whimper.

Playing to its strengths as easy commercial B-roll fodder is the fact the player is made to walk around the card in the target-shooting game to see objectives. It is purely there to play once and never again (it won't take long to lose those cards, anyway -- keep them sealed up and watch their value skyrocket on eBay. Or not), but it's fresh and fun. It's a shame that the character based cards do nothing but project characters on top for you to take pictures of...but hey.

Face Shooting, the Japanese version of Face Raiders, is similar "hard to forget, hard to want to do it again" material. The game takes a snapshot of your grinning visage and then sends those pictures wearing helicopter beanies zooming at you in 3D in a little on-rails shooter controlled with the gyroscope. It is patently and deliberately ridiculous. And for its five minute length, it's absolute hilarity, especially when failure involves you being given a big, wet, sloppy, lipstick kiss by yourself.  

It's been a good first hour. While my first time with other hardware has involved feeling impressed, excited, and at times frustrated, 3DS is the first console I've played that wants -- from the outset -- to make you laugh.