Nintendo Labo gadgets can be remixed with ‘Toy-Con Garage’
Nintendo stunned the gaming world last month when it unveiled Labo, a system that uses the Switch and some cardboard to make lovably homely little minigames. Reception among the Engadget staff was… mixed. But Nintendo might have nullified a growing concern about the system’s longevity with its latest announcement. At a hands-on press event earlier today, the company introduced the Toy-Con Garage, a feature in the Labo’s base software that lets users essentially create their own Switch-empowered cardboard toys.
It might be a complex process, though. Reports from the event explain that users can repurpose cardboard parts and apply new functionality to them through the Toy-Con Garage feature in the Labo software. During a demo, Nintendo showed how one could set the Motorbike cardboard-and-controller setup to drive the RC Car, or reconfigure the piano software and custom cardboard cutouts to make an electric guitar.
I’m ready to play hard #NintendoLabo pic.twitter.com/JlKFrLYKAG
— Devindra Hardawar (@Devindra) February 1, 2018
It’s unclear how much leeway Nintendo will end up giving creators. The issue isn’t in the system’s makeshift controllers — cardboard is cheap — but in the Labo software. If it includes a lot of mappable functionality, it could prolong the platform’s lifespan beyond the handful of projects in each first-party Nintendo kit.
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