Eric Ravenscrafthttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI6QzU8NXFI
The Nintendo Labo kits are already amazing for what is essentially some very clever cardboard. Naturally, Nintendo had to outdo itself by making a friggin’ car, plane, and submarine kit.
Nintendo just announced the new Labo kit, named Toy-Con 03: Vehicle Kit with the video above, and it’s pretty crazy. It starts off with a steering wheel that’s paired with a gas pedal to control a virtual car in what appears to be a pretty robust exploration mini-game. While the Variety Kit has a motorcycle mini-game, it’s not very robust compared to, say, Mario-Kart (which you can also play using the motorbike Toy-Con now). It seems like Nintendo has improved on this problem by making the entire kit use the same big game, instead of five mini-games.
The car is just the beginning, though. As the video shows, you can take the control module (a Joy-Con controller with some cardboard around it) out of the steering wheel and place it into a flight stick, to turn your in-game vehicle into a plane, or a control module to turn it into a submarine. The in-game footage shows the car seamlessly turning into a plane, which then turns into a submarine when it hits the water. Within a single game, your vehicle can shift to suit your environment. That’s pretty cool.
It’s hard to gauge the gameplay of a game we’re only getting bits and pieces of, but just the glimpses we see already look more robust than some of the mini-games from the Variety Kit. The three big cardboard projects also look like a solid middle ground between the five small-to-slightly-less-small Toy-Cons in the Variety Kit, and the one mega ultra project in the Robot Kit.
The new Vehicle Kit will arrive on September 14th of this year for $70. That’s the same price as the Variety Kit, and $10 cheaper than the Robot Kit. It’s still quite a bit of money for a game with cardboard controllers you have to build yourself. On the other hand, it remains insane what Nintendo has done with cardboard, some reflective stickers, and an IR sensor. We can only hope the game itself has more to do this time around, but even if it’s just a quirky little exploration game, you and/or your kids will still probably have hours of fun with it.
Source: Nintendo
