Nintendo 3DS is fun, addictive and pricey

Grown-ups and casual gamers aren’t typically the people you see glued to a portable game system from Nintendo. But having spent time with the handheld Nintendo 3DS, which goes on sale Sunday, I can envision kids wrestling Mom and Dad for the chance to have a go at Nintendo’s highly anticipated portable player. The 3DS is fun, addictive — and pricey at $250, especially when you consider that its portable predecessors, the Nintendo DS family, cost $130 to $170.

Of course, DS devices (which remain in Nintendo’s lineup) lack the chief selling points of the 3DS, notably 3-D gaming without the sort of funky glasses you don to watch extra-dimension movies or 3-D TV.

Nintendo hopes such 3-D hocus-pocus will perform competitive magic. The 3DS arrives at a time when Nintendo not only faces competition in mobile gaming from traditional rivals such as Sony (with its handheld PSP) but also from many appealing and typically far less expensive games that work on smartphones as well as tablets such as the iPad. Smartphones that also do 3-D without glasses were on display at the CTIA trade show I’ve been attending this week and are promised relatively soon.

The 3DS player, at just over 8 ounces and with a 0.8-inch-deep clamshell, is a lot heavier and bulkier than the phone you’ve got in your pocket. It has two LCD screens. The top 3.5-inch display shows off 3-D. The bottom is a 3-inch touch-screen you manipulate with a finger or, in some instances, with the supplied stylus, especially when you have to type on a small virtual keyboard. You manipulate the action through a joystick-like circle pad, control pad and control buttons.