I am actually very interested in this kit. I like that it’s not strapped onto your face. And think Nintendo could offer some good mini games to go with this. Sure it’s not going to be as cool as my PSVR, but something about how silly it looks is actually appealing.
That elephant mask, for example, looks like fun to use
C’mon Nintendo, now’s the time… Virtual Boy VC! That would probably push me to pick this up. Imagine a Labo set that actually LOOKED like the Virtual Boy…
That’s sad. You’d think valve with its flat structure and billions in revenue would be able to repurpose employees on new projects rather than laying them off
They tend to be generous with that kind of stuff though, right? Wasn’t the last group they let go allowed to take their work/development with them? Think that was related to VR as well iirc.
Wonder if any old timers from Nintendo R&D1 were involved with this. Labo is from the team who made Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball, which always felt like an R&D1 game to me in spirit.
As for Valve, unfortunately it doesn’t surprise me, the way the company is organised sounds like it leads to chaos.
We’ll see some thoughtfully designed games hamstrung by underpowered hardware. I can’t imagine how grainy that screen is going to look for close to my eyes.
It’ll probably work the other way round - the limits of the display will probably influence the visual design and objectives of the game (ie I can see a more abstract art direction and well defined objects like in say, Katamari Damacy). It’ll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with.
That said, I wonder how the display will look. You don’t strap it to your face which might make a difference, and the field of view will probably be lower, and there probably won’t be fast movement because of ghosting.
But the pixels of a 720p display are 30% smaller than a 1080p display. The RGB subpixel nature in the Switch’s screen might help to make up that gap slightly as well - an OLED display shares subpixels between neighbouring pixels, leading to a lower effective resolution (PenTile OLED has 2/3rds of the Subpixels of an RGB stripe layout). So resolution-wise it might not look so bad.
The Virtual Boy screen still impresses me with how little ghosting there is due to how fast the oscillating mirrors move. Resolution and refresh rate must have looked like a massive step up from Game Boy, but of course both wouldn’t be improvements compared with CRTs at the time!
The sub-pixels will help with the screen door effect to a degree, but it’s still going to be a grainy mess. This will likely result in worse overall implementation than some of those mobile phone VR solutions, albeit with better designed games. I agree that they will have to shoot for very minimalist art direction in order to keep things looking clean and the frame rate fast and solid. (This does not bother me, personally.)
Put in an order for the whole set. The overview trailer has me convinced this will be a lot of fun. There’s a lot more variety among the core activities than I was expecting, and the 64 extra games is the icing on the cake.
I was reading some previews and one did mention that there’s not that much of a 3D effect, though despite this the immersion is still very good and other attendees agreed it’s much better than they expected. Curious.
I can’t see the actual assembly/building having the same appeal as my first Labo kit, though, but I’m still very interested in how all the creations work so it’ll be a worthwhile exercise putting it all together!
Looking forward to jumping from three months of Virtual Boy sessions to this!
Man, I have to try this. I can’t imagine it will be as good as the normal 2D experiences for SMO or BotW, but it’s just too novel to pass up.
BotW is only 30fps, so I’m not sure how they’re going to make this not feel nauseating. Maybe reducing the rendering load to just the pixels within view allows them to increase the framerate?
Or maybe 30fps isn’t as big a deal as has been believed?
Either way, it seems like it won’t replace the standard way of playing and instead will just be a nice novelty.