AR Games
The main crux of the six AR cards is the classic Mario 'question block' card. With this, you are able to initially unlock a target practice mini-game that warps reality and will more often than not have you up and out of your seat to ensure that you get all of the hits. You won’t simply be moving it left and right, however – sometimes you will have to completely reposition yourself to shoot some targets that are inside holes and ditches that spring up after successive accurate shots. Once you progress enough, you’ll unlock a boss character of sorts – a dragon that you must fire at the indicated body parts in order to defeat. The dragon puts up a bit of a fight and is surprisingly well animated in terms of basic body moments and general expression. Once you’ve beaten the first game there are other different modes to unlock that make further use of the 3DS such as a fishing game, which happens to be alarmingly addictive, amongst other things.
The other cards featuring Nintendo characters can be used to create your very own dioramas of them in various poses. It’s fun for a while and an interesting concept, but the most amount of fun can be had when a similar game that uses Miis becomes available. Your Miis have a lot more poses and expressions on offer than the standard Nintendo characters, adding a bit more uniqueness and individuality to what you can create.
6 left, but what about right?
Detection of the cards themselves can be a bit of an issue sometimes. While they work fine during daylight hours, it seems as if the 3DS cameras have some trouble when attempting to scan them at night time with standard houselights on. Often this can be remedied by moving around to a position which strikes the right balace of less glare while still being well-lit, but it would be near impossible to detect them in the dead of the night with no light. It would probably be far less interesting anyway, as part of the appeal of the AR card games, especially the archery game, is to watch the landscape shift and warp before your eyes.
Face Raiders
Face Raiders is a fairly straightforward game in essence – you’ll take photos of your own face and any other faces and objects that you can think of, and then fire upon them across several stages. However, when you play long enough, you’ll discover that there’s a lot more to it than that. When you do take photos of people, the 3DS will attempt to detect both the age and genre of the subject, and if you decide to take a picture of any other object it will say it’s unidentifiable, rather than taking some sort of guess as to whether your favourite pot plant is a elderly woman or youngish male. Once you’ve taken your initial photo, you are thrust into a battle screen where you must shoot down every flying face that comes at you. Depending on how accurate you are in taking your photos, you will see a variety of eye and mouth movements on the faces that are surprisingly engaging and believable for such software. It definitely gives the enemies a bit more character and are interesting to watch in themselves.
After you’ve managed to shoot enough grunts, you’ll encounter a boss character that is much tougher to take down. They will constantly flip faces around to other photos you’ve taken and you’ll also find that they’ll disguise themselves with fake noses and glasses. Whenever they adopt such a disguise your shots won’t actually count – only a completely unobstructed face can be shot at for damage. When you’ve hit the boss enough, a jewel will appear at the top if its head that you must shoot at to destroy it once and for all. In order to control Face Raiders you will again have to move around quite a lot to zap away enemies, otherwise they will attack you and bring your health meter down. Once you get into a rhythm and realise what kind of game it is, then it becomes quite easy to control – there really isn’t a lot to it outside of moving yourself around and hitting a button on the control pad to fire. Compared with the archery game to be found as part of the AR cards, you won’t have to twist and turn and angle yourself in different ways to hit an enemy, but you will have to use a greater range of motion as some enemies will try to attack from your sides or behind you.
All hail Unicron!
The AR games and Face Raiders can be quick to pass their initial stages, but once you’ve made that bit of progress, there is a surprisingly large amount of content to unlock. There is also a degree of multiplayer play present in Face Raiders, but it’s more of a console passing variety rather than wireless play. Nonetheless, it will hold a person’s attention long enough that the pangs of boredom won’t strike within the first five minutes. There is still a decent amount of replay value to be had when it comes to showing off what the console can do for friends. In terms of being actual 'games', Face Raiders is probably the better of the two titles due to its difficulty at times and a greater presence of "bosses," but the AR concept has far more potential about it.
The two main games bundled into the Nintendo 3DS aren’t sweeping in length and the greatest of depths, but they must be taken for what they are – bundled launch titles included in every console that show off just what the console can do. In this way, the two titles work quite well and should keep people occupied if they are yet to pick up a full version of a game.
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