Twenty-five years have passed since Nintendo’s first attempt at virtual reality. On the few occasions I’ve been blessed with the chance to try a Virtual Boy and experience again its headache-inducing, black-and-blood-red 3D graphics, it’s astonished me that a company of Nintendo’s prestige thought that the technology was ready for consumer use. The Virtual Boy’s failure – it shipped fewer than 800,000 units – still stands as one of gaming’s wildest misjudgements.
Now, Nintendo is attempting VR again, this time within its Labo line for the Nintendo Switch. For those unfamiliar, Nintendo Labo is a build-it-yourself cardboard kit, aimed at children aged 6 and up, that combines with the Switch to blend physical and virtual play. On opening the box, the player is confronted with cardboard sheets, rubber bands and stickers that they must assemble into toy models, like an elephant or a bird. These models hold the Switch’s Joy Con controllers, and can be used to play mini video games designed specifically for their construction.
The starter pack for the new Labo VR contains the bits you need to build the all-important Labo VR goggles and a large cardboard gun, or “blaster”. The latter holds one Joy Con controller at the end of the barrel and one in an attachment at the gun’s side, which you can flick during certain games to activate bullet-time. Expansion sets contain components to build a camera and a mammoth, or a bird and a wind pedal. The combined set of three kits costs £69.99.
Building Labo models is undeniably satisfying. A reassuring mess of cardboard and stickers pile up around you as you try to realise Nintendo’s vision (or make up your own). There are ASMR channels dedicated to the soft scratch of cardboard slotting into cardboard, and the congratulatory pings from the Nintendo Switch when you complete a step correctly.
Nintendo also provides clear and encouraging instructions via the Switch, like “insert the nose firmly” and “is your flap standing up nice and straight?”, and reminds you not to use your goggles to stare into the sun. Build times vary. Though it says on the box that the blaster takes between 120-180 minutes to put together, it took me only 30, and I don’t consider myself much more talented at following flat-pack instructions than the average child. (I found myself longing for Labo’s interactive guidance while destroying my latest IKEA chair.)
Like the original Labo, Nintendo has designed the Labo VR creations to engage your entire body. The wind pedal, for instance, demands that you press your foot down like a bellows; another cardboard structure sees you blow on its wheel like a water mill. Holding the finished models in my hands, I was surprised by their robustness; you can pull, blow and step on them quite firmly and not worry about rips and tears.
So what about the actual VR? A 3D effect, similar to that provided by the glasses at your local Imax is achieved through Nintendo’s “VR Goggles”, which slot into your self-built cardboard visor, in front of the Switch’s 1280x720, 60Hz screen. For reference, that’s a similar resolution to if you put a six-year-old Samsung Galaxy S3 into a Google Cardboard headset. Though groundbreaking visual fidelity is not Nintendo’s aim here, there’s no getting around it: an inch from your face, this level of resolution doesn’t look great. It’s pixely, with a fair amount of motion blur.
Gameplay-wise, much like Nintendo Labo, the actual video games feel like a bit of a sideshow to the cardboard construction phase. The camera build lets you snap pictures of underwater sea-life. The mammoth, in which the Joy-Con slots into the end of the trunk, offers a painting game that Nintendo brags will demonstrate the precision you are capable of achieving with a Joy-Con. The blaster lets you snipe pink monsters with a bubble gun, or play a turn-based multiplayer shooter where you feed fruit to picky hippos. Yes, this is a relatively rudimentary VR experience, but the physicality of Labo is what makes it so fun. Players will spin entertainingly around the room while playing one of the 64 games.
The most novel aspect of the Labo VR offering is the Game Making suite, a feature that, as the title might give away, lets you build your own games. Much like Toy-Con Garage in the Labo, all of the games on offer on Labo VR are theoretically buildable using this toolset, and can be edited from the ground up. Nintendo offers helpful base templates, like “Make a fighting game” or “Make an FPS [first-person shooter] game”. A creative kid has a lot to work with here. Nintendo is hopeful, a representative says, that these experiences might produce the next legendary game designer – “or at least let you build a great tuna fish racing game”.
Read more: My 12-year-old is already well and truly hooked on Nintendo Labo
It should be emphasised that Labo VR is for kids. Nintendo was keen to emphasise that Labo VR, because it has no head strap and can be removed from the eyes at any time, offers a virtual reality experience to the youngest age range on the market, at seven years. This is six years lower than anything else currently available. The games built in the Game Making suite cannot be shared online, out of security concerns for children.
These considerations give you a clear idea of Nintendo’s audience. Playtesting the technology in a room full of adults, and reading complaints online suggesting that Nintendo’s low-res effort risks putting people off VR altogether, it seems vaguely ludicrous to compare Labo VR to other, explicitly adult VR experiences on the market. This is not an experience built to compete with them, but, like Labo before it, something completely different.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
