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Nintendo has gone full circle with the Labo

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The Nintendo hype train knows no bounds. A single whiff of a Nintendo announcement has the Internet melting down, as each and every Ninty fan on the planet begins reeling off an extensive wishlist. Virtual console. Streaming of some sort. Enhanced Amiibo features. A Smash port. No-one imagined Nintendo Labo.

Described as a “new interactive experience for Nintendo Switch… specially crafted for kids and those who are kids at heart”, Nintendo Labo is simultaneously the most unexpected yet most obvious Nintendo creation ever. It’s a selection of ‘build-and-play’ kits that utilise the Switch and connected Joy-Cons in brilliantly unique ways. It’s properly unique. It’s pre-NES vintage Nintendo.

Each Nintendo Labo kit turns modular sheets of cardboard into a range of creations known as ‘Toy-Cons’ when combined with the Switch peripherals. All you need is a right Joy-Con, the cardboard template, correct software and working hands to create everything from a functioning piano to a robot exoskeleton.

In a concerted effort to bring the Switch to a wider audience, Nintendo has gone back to the start. Toymaker. Inventor. Full-circle.

Nintendo Labo Kits

The Nintendo Labo harkens back to the days before the NES, Game & Watch and Mario, when the company was still dreaming up toys such as the Ultra Hand and Love Tester thanks to the genius of Gunpei Yokei.

Yokei started as an engineer at Nintendo and with the help of many other designers and engineers, produced a range of successful toys before the company made the switch to video games. Who’d have thought that nearly 52 years after the creation of the ‘Ultra Hand’, Nintendo would eschew gaming’s natural progression into VR and the like, instead pivoting to cardboard, back to the kind of toys that first brought them success.

The Nintendo Labo is, as a concept, unashamedly Nintendo. Flatpack gaming that anyone can get involved with. It’s a flash of imagination that everyone else would be scared to bring to market.

There’s no doubt that it’ll piss off the ‘hardcore’ gaming community. There will be people that bemoan “$70 for cardboard”. It happened with the Wii, a Nintendo creation that fully embodied the philosophy of ‘games for everyone’, forged its own path and found incredible success despite technological limitations compared to its peers. It’s hard not to draw parallels between the two products.

And the Labo really does represent games for everyone. These base kits are ideal for kids and adults alike but Nintendo has already expressed interest in bringing third-party support and more advanced kits for hobbyists. The scope of application is huge and as a platform, it’s got the ultra-solid foundation that is the Switch, which is experiencing incredible success while still finding its feet. Add to the fact that Nintendo is willing to provide replacement kits and templates for those who want to go it alone and we’re seeing the forward-thinking Nintendo that everybody knows and loves.

For me, the Labo represents the very core of Nintendo. An accessible and truly innovative experience that offers a nod to those who know their humble beginnings creating playing cards and toys. It’s been 129 years since the big N was established and they’re still finding ways to surprise us.

 

 

UK based gaming writer, raised on a diet of Street Fighter and Isometric RPG's. I enjoy playing every game I can get my grubby little hands on.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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