Like to try before you buy? Hope 
to save a few bucks by purchasing your games used? Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D may not be the game for you.
Saved games in the Nintendo 3DS title, which hits shelves Tuesday, can’t be erased. In other words, when your progress is saved, it’s there forever — even if you loan it to a friend or sell it to someone else. If you manage to beat the game, there is no way to get rid of your save file and play it again from scratch.
Between the Nintendo 3DS, Nvidia’s 
efforts to push 3D on the PC and Sony’s recently announced PlayStation 3-branded 3D display, stereoscopic 3D video- games are finally stepping into the spotlight.
But even as more and more games utilize the technology, there’s a debate among game- makers on how much of a draw it will be for consumers.
Early adopters of the Nintendo 3DS have been a pretty 
patient bunch. New games for the system haven’t exactly been rushing to retail, and there’s only so much you can do with that 3D camera. But relief is on the way.
Nintendo says the long-awaited 3DS eShop will launch June 6 — and to celebrate, the company is letting owners of the handheld system download a copy of Excitebike 3D Classic for free, if they grab it within the first 30 days.
The Easter Bunny apparently stuffed a 
few baskets with video games this year. The late holiday and a strong slate of titles overcame gloomy headlines of data theft to boost April video game sales by 26 percent, according to the NPD Group.
Hardware sales were also impressive, climbing 12 percent overall, though Microsoft and Sony had a lot more to celebrate than Nintendo did.
For only the third time in the past year, retail 
game sales saw a year-over-year increase in April. And what a rise it was.
The NPD Group reports that software sales were up 26 percent last month to $503 million. Overall (including hardware and peripheral totals), the industry had brick and mortar sales of $930.7 million – a 20 percent increase.
While the 3DS shot out of the gate at 
launch, the system lost its breath pretty quickly.
Nintendo has acknowledged that sales of its new portable gaming system have slowed down — and it’s not entirely sure why.
Faced with rapidly declining sales and a less 
enthusiastic than expected reception to its newest handheld gaming device, Nintendo has confirmed that it will be releasing a successor to the Wii in 2012.
A prototype of the new device, which has been rumored for the past several weeks, will be unveiled at E3, the video game industry’s annual trade show in June.
When Nintendo announced Super Mario was on the
way to the 3DS in March, the company didn’t offer a lot of details.
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s global president, tossed out a logo (which had a tail), showed a few screen shots and said we’d hear more at E3. It was a frustrating tease for fans.
As the iPhone has stolen the media spotlight and 
been touted as the sole competitor for Nintendo’s dominance of the mobile gaming market, Sony has been somewhat left in the shadows.
That’s understandable, to a point. The company’s first handheld gaming system – the PSP (PlayStation Portable) – never quite lived up to its promise as a true rival to Nintendo’s dominance of the market. And despite the company’s efforts to refresh the PSP brand over the past six years, it never hit the cultural zeitgeist that many expected.
The launch of the 3DS was a certifiable hit — but not a grand slam.
According to data released by sales tracking group NPD, the first-week sales of Nintendo’s new handheld system beat out the first-week sales of its predecessor, the DS, thanks to a price tag that was $100 higher. Unfortunately, that price tag also might have kept some from buying it: just under 400,000 3DS units were sold in its first week, about 100,000 units short of the original DS when it launched in November of 2004.
Chris Morris: Journalist 