Don’t look now, but 3DS is becoming quite a feature-packed little gizmo. The newest addition, available beginning today for free download, is the Nintendo Video service. What is it? The basic concept involves Nintendo surprising you with an unpredictable, ever-changing selection of 3D short films, music videos and promotional material, sent to your 3DS via spotpass while your machine’s in sleep mode. How well this works out, of course, depends entirely on how Nintendo supports it. Time will tell. In the meantime, three of the four initial videos provide a few minutes of light, fun entertainment, all in 3D:
Sunday Jog: A fun, stylized animated short that loses a bit of charm due to timing; I doubt I’m the only viewer who’ll find the ending in somewhat poor taste considering what Japan’s been going through this year.
Dinosaur Office: A stop-motion short from College Humor, featuring the most quotable triceratops ever to appear in a film.
The Captain America movie trailer.
The fourth short, “What is Nintendo Video?” is a very brief, slightly insulting attempt to explain the service. Nintendo of America, please don’t ever use the word “duh” in your promos ever again in an attempt to be cool and edgy.
And that brings me to my one worry about the service: It doesn’t yet feel very “Nintendo.” We have here a random collection chosen by…who knows? Some unseen person(s) is out there selecting the content for this thing, and his or her (their?) taste will determine the shape and style of Nintendo Video. It’s not like you can choose which videos to add to your 3DS: Nintendo will provide and remove them at will. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes–I just hope the driver’s got good taste.
Two suggestions: First, I’d like the option to pay a buck to keep the videos I like. Dinosaur Office was pretty good. Second, I’d like to see “Nintendo Week” delivered through this service. Gary and Alison must be getting pretty lonely over there on the Wii Channel.
Overall, I think it’s a fairly promising debut. What’s your reaction to this new freebie?
