I half walked into Super Mario 3D Land expecting a rushed production: it’s a high-profile Nintendo game that was announced, revealed, demoed and released all in the same year. And at a time where the platform is having its rocky road, surely Nintendo fast-tracked it to get it to stores?

Yeah, that’s obviously not the case. I’m writing this without having 100% completed the game and it’s clear that Super Mario 3D Land got all the love and attention of the best of Nintendo’s “A” games. I’d go as far as saying that this handheld version nearly reaches Super Mario Galaxy 2’s brilliance in design and fun – it’s certainly the best handheld Mario game to date, and easily one of the best Super Mario games developed.

There’s not much “new”to the Mario blueprint here as it lifts its design from games that come before it. There’s a lot of Galaxy and Sunshine platforming, tweaked with jumping abilities seen in Super Mario Bros. 3. Lots of timed jumps on stationary and spinning or rotating platforms, and, naturally, a ton of block smashing and goomba stomping. And just like in most Mario games, deaths are plentiful but so are extra lives.

What I think is special about Super Mario 3D Land is its near seamless merging of 2D and 3D, bringing the platformer back to an old-school feel by locking players into a designed set. It was a hint of things to come in the Galaxy series: Nintendo taking camera control away from the user and letting them explore the 3D-rendered world on its terms, only giving back that control when it’s absolutely necessary. Here, the camera is even more restrictive to the point where you’re stuck with what the level designers give you. That is not a bad thing.

With a camera that’s locked into position, you now simply work within the confines of what the designer wants you to see. Back on the NES, you didn’t — and arguably shouldnt — have the freedom to stop and scroll ahead, and yet in the majority of levels you only needed to see what was immediately surrounding you. In this game, the camera is constantly shifting and moving to ensure that you’re seeing exactly what you need to see to move forward. The designers use this as a tool to build their levels, going so far as to strategically hint and hide some of the all-important collectibles. And it’s done without those weird “in between” issues – you’ll never fudge a jump because the camera was moving from position to position.

It also helps that this camera strategy plays up the 3DS system’s core strength: stereoscopic 3D. The designer is now in full control over what you see, and many times the level designer will screw with depth to show off what stereo3D can mean to gameplay. Imagine a room filled with identical blocks stacked both on top of and in front of each other, and the camera positioned in such a way that it’s difficult to see, without a perception of depth, which is in front and which is beside. With a stereoscopic display it becomes evidently clear, and Nintendo’s designers have come up with some clever challenges that play up the pairing of platform layouts and camera positions to ensure that the 3D slider on your system is turned on.

But it’s also obvious that the designers had to appease those who can’t see – or don’t want to see – the impressive depth perspective. For every “you gotta see this in 3D!” there’s a way out, either by the buttons that can skew the camera left or right or by an in-game trigger that will shift the camera to a flat-friendly view. It’s a smart give-and-take that ensures everyone can play this game to completion. Even cyclopses and pirates.

Any way you look at it, Super Mario 3D Land is a beautiful game, one that shows the visual power of the handheld. At this point you should understand that the 3DS system, just like every handheld Nintendo’s released since the Game Boy, can’t stack up to the current generation of systems on the market – but even so, there’s a lot of power in the 3DS and Super Mario 3D Land pushes it with graphics that feel right at home in today’s gaming age. It might not be running in Galaxy’s silky 60 frames per second environment, but there are times where even the most basic use of shaders can impress – reflections on rotating walls or the shimmer on the water surfaces. And it’s all enhanced with the addition of depth, and there are times you have to just sit and admire those visuals as they jut off into the distance.

Much of this game is based around what 1990’s Super Mario Bros. 3 brought to the table, but not when it comes to moving from level to level. Instead of unlocking challenges in a branching path, it’s a slightly uncreative linear design that mirrors the “one level after the next” of the original Super Mario. It’s not much to complain about, and if it’s because the designers had to focusing on the level challenges over how those levels are presented then I’m hugely glad they did.

The 3DS could have used a game like Super Mario 3D Land right at launch and we could have avoided the last six months of public doom and gloom. But whether a Christmas release was always in the cards or the game just needed another few months in cooker, the 3DS got itself one hell of a system seller within its first year. It’s a must-play, absolutely.

Now let’s see what Nintendo designers can do with stereo3D-enhanced “New Super Mario Bros.” on the handheld. My money’s on a Holiday 2012 release.

Of all the days to oversleep and rush through the morning routine to catch the commuter train to work. Usually for a few minutes after waking I have time to hit key websites to catch up on current events that happened while unconscious, but this particular day I had to read about Nintendo’s drastic and sudden 3DS plan on the ride into to work through a series of twitters from colleagues who got to the news before I did.

I’ve been in Nintendo’s 3DS corner since before its launch because I dig the technology and its capabilities. But I never hid from my opinion that the system, and its games, were too goddamn much. And clearly the consumers have spoken with a very muted first three months. Of course, more than 800,000 systems sold stateside isn’t exactly something to scoff at, especially considering it’s a launch outside of the Christmas/Holiday gift giving window. For a New Piece of Technology with a Unique Device-Selling Gimmick, though, that’s kind of a weak start.

The drop from $250 to $170 in a matter of three months is easily one of the most severe strategic moves I’ve seen out of Nintendo. Does it smack of desperation? Sure. But it also smacks of humble pie: Nintendo was playing the egotistical Sony mindset of “Hey, people are going to want it for its name alone!” like exactly what happened with the PlayStation 3.

Just like Sony, I think Nintendo’s going to come out of this just fine with the sudden, enormous price drop.

Now (or rather, in a month) the system’s sticker shock is gone. The 3DS is an enormously capable system with a cool and unique stereoscopic feature that no other gaming device offers as a stock function, and it’s been brought down to the price of the last generation’s system. This is where it should have been from Day One.

And judging from the previous systems’ costs, I don’t believe for a second this price drop will put Nintendo in the red. We’ll never, ever know for sure, but I’m willing to bet that Nintendo’s still making a bit of change on each system at $170…and even if it’s only a small margin, Nintendo’s currently hard at work shaving costs by shrinking and swapping components behind the scenes to beef up those profits.

I also have to commend Nintendo for proactively squashing the outcry of complaints from early adopters: the Ambassador’s Club is a brilliant move to make people who already bought in feel special. The cost involved in the free NES and Game Boy Advance games is minimal to Nintendo but hugely valuable to gamers, and 20 games across Nintendo’s backlog of titles, completely at no cost to owners of 3DS, is one of the most satisfying apologies I’ve experienced out of a game publisher. I’ll be surprised if Nintendo holds up its promise of keeping these games exclusive for the Ambassadors, and I’m not going to complain when I see them hit the eShop for everyone to buy.

From my perspective, Nintendo needs to continue this apologetic momentum by embracing all the evolutionary changes that have been happening while the publisher’s been in its “success bubble.” Online persistence is a great start, but there’s not a whole lot of point when very few software titles take advantage of this “always connected” internet support. Three months out of the gate and we’ve only got two games that can be played online…and they’re both fighting games.

40 dollars for gaming experiences that aren’t much beyond what handheld gamers were getting at $20 and $30 on the DS – and under $10 bucks on Apple’s App store – is insane, and this premium needs to shift dramatically. I don’t think cartridges need to disappear, but it definitely feels like going digital distribution in the majority might be a strong strategy.

Along those lines you just can’t ignore the Apple perspective anymore: the device is open for anyone to develop for – cheaply, I might add – and the App Store is constantly being refreshed with a huge variety of cheap AND premium experiences, with the publishers in command of the prices to give them full control of sales strategies. You might not enjoy playing on a button-free device, but it’s hard to dismiss the freedom the developers have had with Apple’s devices – it’s fueled enormous innovation in touch-screen gaming and spawned a revival of retro-style experiences.

The price drop will definitely help boost the user base, but only a total shift in strategy will turn 3DS into a true success.

There’s no point in having a whole bunch of classic videogame systems if you’re not willing to break them out to play them. Due to limited space I’m not a gaming packrat like some of my friends, but I’ve made it a goal to get my comparatively small collection out of storage and into normal rotation as cheaply and with as little clutter as humanly possible.

Today, I’m nearly 100 percent there.

Now, I could have simply hooked these systems up to my living room HDTV, but anyone can tell you that anything running in a composite or RF signal looks like complete and utter ass on an LCD or Plasma. CRT really the only way to go, and luckily I had a bunch of Sony 13 inch Trinitrons laying around from a extracurricular project I was working on in my final days at IGN.

I picked the best of the bunch and brought it out of the garage to be my gaming television. I recycled the rest because I didn’t get a single bite on Craigslist trying to sell these things.

Now comes the fun part: where to host the games. It all starts with a trip to Ikea. I found the Micke desk perfect for my little project. Not only does it have a little gutter underneath to move cables out of the way, there’s a compartment that can hold either a tower computer case or three shelving units.

Two hours of Swedish-style construction later, I was ready to rock. Television? Check. Systems? Now out of storage and ready to roll.

In the bottom compartment I put a six-outlet power strip. Years ago, SEGA put out a licensed strip that had its outlets spread out to accommodate the wider power packs of the then-current generation game systems. This was very helpful in getting all the systems plugged into the same strip.

Now, this desk isn’t super ideal for certain systems. The classic Genesis, for example, doesn’t fit inside the compartment in its natural orientation, so I had to stuff it in sideways. Considering I’ll be keeping the door closed on the cubby area it doesn’t really matter which direction it’s facing. I also put the Saturn and the Dreamcast on the same shelf, so I’ll admit all the systems aren’t super accessible.

To get all the systems hooked up to a single television, you’ll need a switchbox. Composite switchers are still surprisingly pricey, about 20 bucks for a four input/one output box. But I quickly ran out of plugs, even with my top-loading NES system hooked up to the television RF (the system lacks composite output, removed to make the unit cheaper). I found a very cheap secondary switcher at Big Lots. This unit takes three inputs and outputs once and uses a really cheezy slider switch. But it’s good enough to plug three systems into one of the inputs of my original switchbox. These switchers are mounted on the side of the desk, hidden from view and keeping things looking neat when it’s anything but. Just don’t look directly into the spaghetti and you’ll be fine.

To keep any additional clutter down, I’m putting the controllers away when not in use. The wide slide-out drawer of this Ikea desk does that job quite nicely. The secondary drawer is used for games in my regular gaming rotation, but it’s quite small so I’ll have to find a secondary storage bin.

All told, I have my NES, Super NES, Genesis, Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast all hooked up and ready to play, all in a tidy out of the way 42×20 footprint. Like I said, it’s nothing like what you’re going to find in some ubercollector’s house, but it’s my little gaming nook and I’m proud of it. There’s still room for improvement, but now I can go back to playing Pilotwings 64 and the original Star Fox the way they were meant to be played.

Hi, my name is Craig, and I’m addicted to StreetPass.

It all started when I saw the green light on the hinge of my 3DS kick on while I was eating my Panda Express. Someone had just walked by with their own system, and for a split second those two systems chatted with each other and traded info from Street Fighter IV, Nintendogs, and the built-in Mii Plaza.

Right then and there, I was hooked. And I didn’t even do anything but carry my system with me.

StreetPass is this unassuming feature of the 3DS, and you won’t know how cool it is until it happens to you. Nintendo advertised this feature right from the start — it’s essentially Tag Mode developed on the Nintendo DS way back in 2004 for the original Nintendogs, but evolved to be aware without the game in the system.

The original Tag Mode was insanely restrictive. To get a transfer, two people have to A) have the game, B) have the game running in its tag mode, C) have the system on them, and D) come within a hundred feet of each other with this criteria. You’re playing the odds that you’ll never get a hit in your entire lifetime.

StreetPass is much more open solution. As long as the mode is enabled, both in your Settings and via the Wireless switch on the side, your Nintendo 3DS is always looking out for other systems, sniffing out data from games that are StreetPass compatible. Nintendogs sends dogs with photos and items. Street Fighter IV trades custom teams of figurines for a turn-based battle. Ridge Racer 3DS hands over ghost data for specific time trial tracks.

After that day of StreetPass initiation, I’ve had my 3DS in my possession. I’ve been on walks and riding my bike in areas that I would expect 3DS systems to be populated. Shopping centers, strip malls, department stores. Every once and a while I’ll get a hit, but some days my system simply looks at me with a shrug.

It does help that I have a housemate who also has a 3DS. Every morning his walk to work takes him just close enough to my docked 3DS so I can get another Mii Plaza visit — and now that our systems are aware of each other after more than two StreetPasses, we can even leave personal messages to each other. I have enough space for “Do the dishes!” but I haven’t used that one yet.

Wondercon swung by the San Francisco area this weekend, and it’s here where I wanted to experience the critical mass. I expected a convention full of comic book nerds to be with 3DS, and they did not disappoint. It was here where I experienced the small limitation of StreetPass: each game has a designated cap of user trades, and once that cap is hit you have to clear it out or no more StreetPassing. At Wondercon I was filling up the 10-person limit in Mii Plaza almost every hour, and Street Fighter IV about every four. These events of tens of thousands isn’t exactly a “real world” scenario for StreetPass, so I tried not to let it spoil me that I was getting 3DS hits every time I walked the convention floor.

And now I look at public 3DS gamers in disgust when I see them playing their systems without the Wi-Fi light blinking. Selfish no-good players trying to conserve batteries WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??! You’re not doing me any good having a system that’s not giving me the stuff I want.

Today I landed a StreetPass hit at the local Target while shopping for underwear, and that satisfied my craving for the day.

Some words of advice for developers working on StreetPass-compatible games: don’t hide the “Enable” option, or you won’t get many people utilizing it. Have the gamer opt in the second they turn on the game for the first time. Also, don’t be lame in your StreetPass support: give us a reason to designate one of the 12 StreetPass slots in our system to your game. There aren’t 12 games on the 3DS that support the feature, but by this summer we’re going to have to discriminate — especially when Nintendo opens up the 3DS Shop for digital downloads.