Of course, the news is, by now, some 12 hours later, old-hat: the Nintendo 3DS hits store shelves on Sunday, March 27, with the expected price tag of $249 (the same price as the Sony PSP, which debuted almost exactly six years earlier, on March 24, 2005). And while the rest of the information unveiled this morning at Nintendo’s 45-minute press conference is likewise dated in the never-ending lanes of the super-fast super-information highway, there are some rather telling nuggets buried amidst the marketing talk and gameplay videos that can be – and probably are being, right this moment – passed over much too quickly in the mad dash for more Kid Icarus screenshots.

Chief among these foreshadowing “bombshells,” by far, is Nintendo’s handling of the 3DS’s online capabilities. The dreaded Friend Code regime is weakened, although not fully overturned, with codes for each individual game being replaced by one singular code per system – and even this can be circumnavigated entirely by being in physical proximity with other users. Battles between characters saved to your 3DS and those saved to other players’ automatically erupt when passing one another in the street, even if the handhelds are in sleep mode; similarly, a slumbering 3DS will automatically detect and connect to wi-fi hotspots to search for game updates, video downloads, and other assorted 3D niceties. And an eShop ties it all together, functioning, as one might expect, like a cross between Xbox Live’s Games Marketplace and Apple’s App Store (and the Wii’s Virtual Console, offering three-dimensional versions of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and even NES titles).

If online is a newfound focus for Nintendo, (mostly) binding all of its portables together in a mystical force that connects and reinforces rather than segregating and alienating their owners, augmented reality likewise delineates users’ experiences in a (somewhat) fundamental way. From using your picture as target practice to terraforming the furniture in the room around you in racing games, the 3DS constantly asks you, the player, to engage it in activity and relate to it with and in different behaviors. Packed-in playing cards come to life, in Eye of Judgment style, when looked at through the camera; Steel Diver has you spin in your chair while holding the handheld up to your face like a periscope. And in a riff of AR gaming, a pedometer is even included in the system that translates footsteps into coins that can be dropped at the eShop 

The resultant effect, of course – or so the big N hopes – is that your 3DS will never leave your side. It will be your trusty companion, traversing downtown subways as well as the hallway to your bedroom as you look to duel and loot, in that order. It’ll be the window into your gaming world, showing what your friends are up to at any given moment while transmuting – literally – the environment around you from reality to fantasy. It’ll play old games and new, in boring 2D and painful 3D, and (hopefully) refine the way you make Miis for your parents and girlfriend, thereby sucking them into its powerful spell. It is the future, Nintendo’s future, and it is glorious in the way it will keep you away from your mobile device and prevent you from picking up the PSP2 (like you would do that anyway).

Or will it? This major leap for Nintendo is still a rather small step (sideways, if not forwards) for the rest of the industry; between the tried-and-true waters of consoles and the ever-expanding territories of smart phones, there is little that is individually or even inherently new about the experiences that the 3DS provides – except for the glasses-free 3D, that is, which is already whispered to be at the heart of the next generation of iPod Touches and iPhones. The 3DS may very well end up being a waiting action rather than an investment, a brief period of treading water while in the midst of a longer voyage of swimming across the ocean.

This is a very apt description of Nintendo’s technology, of its gadgetry and gimmicks. It does nothing, however, to touch upon its roster of games, the very essence of the system itself. Nintendo has promised 30 titles in the “launch window” that starts on March 27 and extends all the way up to E3’s official kick-off on June 7 – an average of three games a week, making it one of the most robust launch offerings yet and an extremely hard standard for either Sony or Apple to compete with, particularly with such entries as Resident Evil, Splinter Cell, and Shin Megami Tensei in the mix.

And this is where the foreshadowing comes in. Will Sony’s inevitable counterattack result in another counterstrike from Nintendo, taking the 3DS’s baby steps in the online world and giving them greater extension in its next console? And will Apple completely sidestep and -swipe them all with the iPad 2, combining 3D with multi-touch controls and so-cheap-it-hurts game libraries? And will Nintendo complete the cycle by utilizing the third-generation DS as an internal test bed and external provocateur all over again?

Hard to see, the future is.

Hopefully for us, the present – and glasses-free 3D – won’t be.
 

Marc N. Kleinhenz is features editor for TotalPlayStation, as well as a freelance videographer. You can read his latest analysis – and incendiary commentary – of this year’s console wars here.