GOTY 2018 - NUMBER NINE
Video version

It’s all very easy to smirk at the unsold Labo boxes on the shelves in GAME and call Nintendo naive for thinking it was a viable product. Kids want what’s cool, and what’s cool is what’s trending, and what’s trending is what’s cheap or ubiquitous. Fortnite, fidget spinners, Facebook. Empty, vapid shite that can’t organically nurture passion. Labo’s target audience is too narrow and too quirky to ever support a craze to its full potential. But that’s my groove, ya dig? This is the Switch’s flexibility bending into the form of a Wii U. Concepts raised by minds unaware of why people buy Xboxes. Labo’s the kind of thing I hope I’d have wanted when I was a kid.

But this isn’t about kids. This is about why a childless man in his thirties loves Labo. I love it for all the things admirable about it. I think this will be more relatable if I get a little more anecdotal though.

My first week with Labo was a unique thing. It was a videogame launch that felt completely fresh. A big slab of a box comes through my front door, and with the help of some brilliant, considerate tutorial software, we’d make a wealth of stupid games peripherals together. We’d discover things about the ingenuity of hardware design, and run down a road towards daft, high-concept novelty games. We’d build the Dreamcast 2 and thank the engineers who made it possible.

The process of constructing is a rare, if not unique, thing to find in something sold as a videogame. You open the squat Labo box, follow the attractive and carefully presented instructions, and you slowly create a new toy. Every step, gaining new insight into hardware design and the foresight Nintendo had when implementing each bit of new technology into the Joycon. It’s revelatory. A lot of the Labo talk has been about inspiring kids to get into inventing, but the process is also a valuable lesson for lifelong videogame fans who might take a lot of the cleverness of peripheral for granted when they start to play a game with it. Labo’s not only given me an entirely new appreciation of the Switch, but gaming hardware in general. I’m bowled over by how good Nintendo are at their jobs.

Look, let’s try and get over the whole console war patter. I really like Nintendo. I think they have really exciting and interesting ideas about different directions to push the games industry in. You kind of have to buy into that vision to really explore the extent of those ideas though. You have to trust them and fill them with money, like a big Luma, and if everything goes well, you get to go to an exciting new place.

I like the Switch so much, it’s actually made it difficult for me to play long games on traditional consoles. I like that I can play a game with long tedious stretches, like Okami or something, and play the boring bits in wee fifteen minute windows of free time. Not having to grin and bear it, dedicating your entire evening’s leisure time to something you hated doing. I like that almost every game I buy for it doubles up as travel entertainment. I like how casually I can start a local multiplayer game of something.

An adult talking to adults about Labo is a silly thing. Nobody wants to do it. They deflect to talking about Nintendo as a company, or distribution methods or whatever else. I don’t mind. Labo’s a set of daft toys you get to build, and it’s fun. I can talk about the other stuff too, but the core of it – the thing we’re actually focused on here – is a silly thing. You won’t like it if you’re not into silly things.

I love silly things. I love Sega Bass Fishing on the Dreamcast and Rock Band and the big Super Hang-On arcade machine that you get to sit on. To some degree, Labo is Nintendo’s way of making those games in 2018.

It’s the silliness of owning a piece of cardboard that makes a toy piano that sounds like a spluttering old man.

There’s so much negativity clouding how people look back at games like those. Such a waste of plastic and silicon. Expensive novelties that become boring and discarded within weeks. Labo’s environmental impact is more comparable to a week of daily newspapers. It’s five distinct, high-concept toys and games, and they’re all doable within this ingenious construction project. You get sick of them – and I’m not encouraging this behaviour by any means – you can break down the entire thing and recycle it. Labo isn’t just an environmental stunt, but a way to teach people about what’s been going on inside their electric boxes for decades.

In the Switch’s first year, I was torn. Nintendo were producing some of the best games they’ve ever made and making a massive success, commercially, but I was worried that we’d lost the silly Nintendo. Labo shows me that they’re still here, and sillier than ever, but in a remarkably sensible, clever, innovative way. If Nintendo lost that, I’d worry that I wouldn’t find videogames exciting anymore. The Wii U was silly, and I loved it, but it was a commercial failure. I was worried that Nintendo were going to be silliness-shy, moving forward. Labo is the thing that turns their new iPad lookalike into something ridiculous, and I couldn’t be more thankful for its presence.

This series was one of the coolest ideas to have a DIY game maker. I still have my kits after all this time, and I keep my LABOs stored in a box, but its something I wish got more support and maybe options to purchase higher quality materials down the line.

The on screen directions are easy to follow and give you the ability to rewind and rewatch a step if you didn't catch it the first time. The materials that it comes with are strong and even if you don't adhere a sticker correctly to be scanned, you can see where you messed up and possibly fix it. Its also a cool way of seeing how the joycons work so that you get an idea of game development and what the system can do.

I built all of the kits in this one and played the games a few times each before moving on to the next one. I haven't returned in a while to use them, but I pull them out every once in a while to play with my nieces.

the piano is the only really cool thing in here everything else gets boring in like 2 seconds
RC cars are fun to dick around with if you have friends over though
i guess this is a textbook example of "the journey is better than the destination" since the most fun you have with this stuff is building it and the games you actually play on it are honestly pretty boring. I was a fool and bought this assuming that nintendo was going to support the weird lil cardboard doodads in future games like amiibo or something but they never did and I literally don't even know where all the cardboard shit is in my house anymore.

Honestly this got memed on a lot but this is a really fun little package. I don't know if I should count the cardboard part of this but it's really fun to put together. The RC car and house minigames are pretty boring but if we're being completely honest, I really dig the fishing, racing, and especially the piano minigames. There's a surprising amount of content and stuff to do after you put it all together, even if the building is the main appeal. It's a cute little thing you can do! There's tons of charm and fun to be had with this. It just doesn't go very in-depth with anything and you'll probably put it away and never touch it again after a bit. It's alright. I'm okay with it. I dig it.