Nintendo Finds Another License to Print Money With the 3DS

Yeah, alright, so there’s no way I’m not rapping about this today. As of yesterday, the Nintendo 3DS was for realy-reals revealed, with president Satoru Iwata himself showing off the device, flanked by a bevy of beautiful women who will likely never play a 3DS. As always, E3 was a party.

So what’s the scoop? Well, obviously, the thing plays games in glorious glasses-free widescreen 3D, effectively seeing Nintendo beat Sony and Microsoft into the goddamn ground to another breakthrough technology – this is, of course, assuming 3D is in fact the future. But so far, so good. In fact, Iwata mentioned this himself, stating during his presentation, ‘As you know, Nintendo produced the first 3D videogame… 15 years ago.’ Yes. Yes, he was referencing the Virtual Boy. It takes a big man to admit his mistakes. Big ups, Iwata.

Anyway, the 3DS’ technology is a ‘parallax barrier’, a second LCD panel that sits over top of the main screen, allowing you to see two sets of pixels and, in effect, creating 3D. Unless you’re really, really tech savvy, it’s kind of confusing. But apparently, it works well, and looks awesome. I guess we’ll find out this holiday season.

The most ingenious part of this device is probably the lack of a need for any additional hardware – the 3DS needs no glasses, no special television, nothing. And it’s in the palm of your hand. While Sony is enabling 3D on many upcoming Playstation 3 games, not only are you tethered to your living room, but you’re gonna need to donate a few of your organs to afford the hardware. Nintendo should really just look into ways of legally printing money, and bypass this whole videogame development thing. It would totally save them some time.

[Via Joystiq, BBC, Dvice, GadgetVenue, the Entire Goddamn Internet]