Just when I thought the pace at which new video game announcements being made for the new year had slowed down, giving me some much needed time to complain about the lack of good smartphone games from certain insanely popular (and fandom-rich) franchises, Nintendo walks in with an amazing gift, a gift literally wrapped in a box, a cardboard box no less.
Nintendo Labo. It is the latest innovation that can be used on the Switch. These cardboard kits from Nintendo are essentially a series of do-it-yourself (DIY) peripherals which can be used with the Nintendo Switch, to transform into a piano, a fishing road, a motorbike, or even a house! The video trailer released by the company for Labo makes it look uber cool.
One of the kits in Labo is the “Robot Kit”, a slightly complex contraption that when built, converts into a huge cardboard backpack and links with your hands and feet via strings that detect movement. This backpack then lets you control an on-screen robot that goes on walks and destroys cities like a badass. With Labo’s Cardboard tech, Nintendo may actually be trying to revive the “Project Giant Robot”, a Wii U experiment in which the gamepad could be used to control an onscreen robot.
“Whaaat? Cardboard and Motion Sensing? That’s crazy!” You think? But, this isn’t really new. The tech involves Infrared (IR) readers which detects when you are pressing a key on the cardboard, and then translates that into action on the screen. For the remote-controlled motorcar, the reader translates the button pressing and makes use of the ‘HD rumble’ on the joycons to make the cardboard car move around. Now that’s some real adaptable technology. The line of such games in this “Toy-con” project goes against the grain of AR/VR and allows for creativity and some good basic DIY games for kids. And if they break, you can always fix it with some tape.
If you ask me, Labo now overtakes Google Cardboard in the list of cool things that paper products can do. To conclude, if you cannot afford to get your Switch-owning friend a new game, just gift them a box!