Nintendo 3DS Roundup

The demo appears to be set on the Wii Sports Resort Island. I spotted the swordfighting dais, the baseball stadium and a few other prominent landmarks from my hours spent doodling around in free flight mode in Island Flyover, wishing for a new Pilotwings. Gently guiding the biplane through hoops in Ring Challenge feels almost as natural with the sensitive, lovely-to-use 3DS analogue stick as it does with the MotionPlus. The quality of the hardware here is beyond question. The responsive stick is so far removed from the PSP's fiddly nub that it beggars belief.

The rocket challenge features a very Mii-like jetpack wearer, which raises the possibility that Miis might go cross-platform. It's simple to control - you press A to fire up the rockets and use the analogue stick to adjust the direction of the jets. The little pilot goes zooming and bouncing around the island at surprising speed, but the 3D effect and depth of field has no trouble adjusting. I found it worked a little better with the 3D effect turned down slightly with the slider on the side of the screen - otherwise my eyes would occasionally try to focus on my plane and the background at the same time and send me crashing into the side of a building.

Hollywood 61

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As a Ubisoft-developed title, Hollywood 61 is the only non-Nintendo game playable at the showcase, and unfortunately the difference is immediately apparent. The 3D isn't well-suited to the hand-drawn graphical style and all the characters and objects on-screen look like poorly stacked cardboard cut-outs. Turning the 3D effect down confuses the image, too. The cut-out effect might be intentional, though, and it's very much a work in progress, so there's no need to rush into the comments thread and proclaim that third-party developers can't make games for the 3DS just yet.

It's a puzzle-based murder mystery game, clearly aimed at the bewilderingly enormous Professor Layton-devoted portion of the DS-owning casual crowd. The demo opens with a car journey towards an old theatre, during which a comically animated cardboard man gives us a little badly lip-synched background information about the murderer on the loose, who has a dangerous obsession with the as-yet-unnamed protagonist.

The 3D makes parking up outside the theatre and getting out of the car far more visually interesting than it should be, and a lot more interesting than the first challenge, which is a light puzzle designed to turn on the floodlights in the theatre. I've mentioned before on Eurogamer that I have absolutely no capacity whatsoever for light puzzles. My brain just cannot understand how they work. Once the floodlight is eventually awakened through sheer trial and error, it reveals a body hanging above the stage with a written note inviting me to pan the camera around to find the hidden message. Panning all the way to the left and right of the stage reveals the words "YOU'RE NEXT!" daubed on the stage curtain in white paint, before the demo ended. To be honest I'm not enormously scared yet, Ubisoft, but the finished game does have the potential to be interesting.