Ok, so I was thinking through this for the last month: Get the XL, even though I own a launch 3DS, or get me a nice Vita. A friend was staying at my house for a few days and he brought over his Vita and I really love that system. But man, besides GR there is literally nothing I would
have to play at the moment and the next game I'm interested in is Persona 4, which I already own on another system.
Then there are already 17 awesome 3DS retail games on my shelf and the XL is like half the price, because I want the 32gig card if I get a Vita.
So Vita has to wait until next year and I got myself this bad boy:
So here are my first impressions after day one.
I got the red one even though that was the only color I haven't seen up in person before. I dislike the tone of the blue one under natural lighting conditions and the silver one looks like something my grandparents would have bought so it had to be red.
And I'm sooo happy with my decision! The shitty Iphone pic isn't doing it justice. Its a nice saturated darkish red. By far the best one of the launch colors imo. Even better than white imo.
The materials feel nice, especially on the outside. All buttons and the slidepad are a major improvement to the original.
I was expecting the worst with the speakers but they are totally fine from what I heard so far, but I haven't tested them a lot yesterday. Using headphones most of the time anyway.
The screen: Yes, the tone of screens of my unit are pretty yellowish. And yellowish is an understatement. During the data transfer I had both systems side by side and compared to my 3DS the screens of the XL are
piss yellow, and I'm not even joking.
Made a pic but it doesn't show how yellow they are, when they are supposed to be white :/
Upper screen is a bit worse than lower as well...
But as soon as I started playing games it wasn't a problem at all. The colors during gameplay are actually fine.
I played a lot of games and WOW, it's such a fresh and awesome experience. I don't want to review all of my games but highlights were Star Fox, Mutant Mudds, MK7, Revelations, Zen Pinball
Couldn't get to much into Kid Icarus U and Theathrythm for now, because I don't want to play stylus heavy games until I have screen protectors on that thing.
OoT was the only one where I realised, that it looks definitively more pixelated than on the small one.
Ask if you have questions to any specific games.
Gameboy, NES and GBA games are amazing on that screen, also in full screen mode. Don't know what people find blurry, looked good to me. At last I tested a Metal Slug 7 (DS) and maybe it's time to shelve my DSiXL. In the original ratio it's perfect and in full screen it looks a tiny little bit blurry but still totally playable.
Now the "bad" thing. I'm reading a lot of "the 3D is just better all around on the XL" comments in this thread and that is simply not true.
The effect is not "better" in any way, just because the screen is bigger. It's the same.
But the sweetspot is much, much smaller on the XL for sure. I had the same experience on a demo unit two weeks ago and was already worried but someone suggested that it's because of the calibration on the demo unit. But it's not.
With the XL the screen-eye-distance has to be pretty much exactly something like 30cm/12". If I get closer to my face or move it away (e.g rest it on my lap) the effect brakes almost immediately and vertical lines appear on the screen. That wasn't the case with the orig. 3DS...
So a small but big minus in the end... But I'm super happy with my purchase regardless
btw: I lost my entire friendlist with 100 entries, because I spilled soda on my old one on Kid Icarus launch day and Nintendo had to reset the internal memory of my old machine when they fixed it.
so here is my new FC: 0087 3341 5913
I don't want to be forever alone
