OXCGN’s 3D Gaming Comparison

Part I: Nintendo 3DS

by Alex Baldwin

©2012 Alex Baldwin

We will our lives in three spatial dimensions. We have two eyes. We see two images.

And yet, until recently, our games have only fed us one.

This made sense two decades ago when hardware restrictions confined game design to only up and down, left and right. And yet, the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 arrived with worlds that existed in three dimensions with depth. This shifted not just the way games are rendered as sprites gave way to polygons, but the way we control them as analogue thumbsticks became a necessity.

However, we were still stuck perceiving worlds with depth as flattened images on our screen. Nothing other than our knowledge of what is ‘correct’ and the ability to shift the camera indicated that the sun was not just a small yellow ball a few feet over the hero’s head.

Three dimensions of fun? Let’s find out…

Filed under: Oxcgn Special feature, Xbox 360 | Tagged: 3d, 3d comparison, 3d gaming, 3d video game, nintendo, Nintendo 3DS, nvidia, Playstation, Playstation 3, Sony, three dimensional gaming, three dimensional video game, Virtual Boy | 2 Comments »