3DS Release Date and Price Announced!

It's the moment we've all been waiting for. One of the most anticipated handheld consoles ever has finally had its release date and price announced. Yup, the 3DS will be hitting the UK shelves on the 25th of March 2011, at a hefty but worth it price of £230. Well, at least it isn't £300 like all those rumours suggested. They announced the console's details for Europe at the recent 3DS event in Amsterdam, where they also showed several new English trailers for some of the many games. Super Street Fighter IV 3D is clearly going to be a launch title, as it looks pretty much finished and shedloads of info have been pouring out over these past few weeks. Alongside a trailer for that, we also got some new footage of Dead or Alive: Dimensions, showing a Metroid: Other M stage in action. Exciting, no?

Among the other titles on show were the two confirmed Virtual Console games, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land, both of which are Game Boy and Game Boy Colour titles. They're not in 3D, but it's nice to see them running on the new handheld. Some Augmented Reality games were also shown off, including Face Raiders, a shooting gallery style game where you shoot images of faces taken with the camera. Pretty creepy, but since we're getting this and many other AR games for free, we can't really complain. On top of all this, trailers for many other titles were shown off. There was no sign of Metal Gear Solid, to my dissapointment, but with everything else to make up for that game's absence I really don't care so much.

The cheapest (trusted) place to get a 3DS seems to be Asda, at £217 for the console in either of the available colours. They also seem to be doing bundles, with titles like Super Monkey Ball 3D, Street Fighter IV and Dead or Alive. I'll certainly be trying to save as much money as possible so I can get Resident Evil soon after the 3DS arrives, so I think the best place to pre-order the handheld will be at Asda. Who said supermarkets selling games was a bad thing? Be sure to get the pre-orders in kids! They will have been cleared off the shelves before long...