Why the Nintendo 3DS’ 3-D Slider Is the Best Thing Ever

The Nintendo 3DS is here, we have a stack of games to play, and you can expect our huge, blowout review before the system’s official release March 27. I’ve been living with the thing, playing through the launch software, and trying to figure out just how bad the battery life really is.

Spoiler: It’s pretty bad.

In the meantime, readers have been asking about the 3-D effect — are we getting tired of the sense of depth and turning it off altogether, as others have already reported? The issue isn’t that cut-and-dried, as each game seems to have its own 3-D sweet spot. Some games are fine with the 3-D slider put to maximum, while others don’t seem to work well at all with any level of 3-D.

This is the smartest thing that Nintendo has done with the hardware: Allow the players to adjust the 3-D on the fly.

The Switch Is Life


Pilotwings benefits from 3-D, but it's hard on the eyes when maximized.

The 3DS’ main gimmick is the glasses-free 3-D screen, but Nintendo included a slider on the right-hand side of the device that allows you to adjust the 3-D effect up and down or turn it off entirely. You don’t have to go to a menu, you don’t have to reboot the software, you can adjust the 3-D whenever you’d like — even just to let someone watch over your shoulder — and it works beautifully.

If adjusting the 3-D required you to leave the game, or even if it were simply a part of a menu, it wouldn’t be nearly as compelling a feature. I can turn the 3-D off before handing the system to my son, or bring the level all the way up for a single cut-scene. It’s convenient, and this is important because there’s no one-size-fits-all setting for the games.

Steel Diver looks great with the 3-D slider all the way up. It doesn’t add a ton of depth, but it does give more weight to the feeling that you’re underwater, and some of the little details in the game — the schools of fish and the rainbows above the water’s surface — really pop in 3-D. My eyes never felt strained or sore, and the 3-D effect looked weak when dialed down.

In Madden NFL Football I was unable to keep the 3-D on at all. There are too many details and bits of information to take in between plays, and having my eyes constantly adjust to the 3-D field and then the 2-D text was incredibly hard, to the point where my head began to ache after only a few minutes. Turn the 3-D off, and the problem goes away.

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