Gadgetory

one two three oh my god I'm so nervous so this is Nintendo lab oh it's a new DIY cardboard accessory kit for the switch and it lets you make things like a fishing rod or motorcycle and it comes with its own corresponding games for it currently there's two kits on the market there's a $70 variety kit which comes with five separate games and there's $80 robot kit which lets you suit up and punch a bunch of skyscrapers so you might be asking yourself why is this cardboard so expensive aren't I just gonna play with it once and be done with it and the answer is no there's this thing called toy con garage which is like a coding platform that lets you remix like all these different games and like basically make whatever you want with it Nintendo has actually been putting out these trailers that show all the different things you can do with toy con garage like full-on tank simulator or a little device that feeds your pets and they also showed a little bit of what looked like a level band I thought this was really cool and I wanted to try it out for myself so I thought of a really simple song I could play which is Rainbow Connection how hard could it be and two days later I am now a shell of a person let's start with the piano this is one of the more interesting complicated pieces of the variety kit the build guide says it takes about three hours to build but I think that's factoring in time that it takes to make with a child our production manager Meg who is very much an adult took her about half the time to make this so the software makes it really easy to follow along step by step to build your cart or toy and one of the best parts is moving around the camera you can zoom in zoom out and it'll really help you visualize the toy in a 3d space you can go forwards and backwards if you miss a step and it's really great for kids they can take their time and learn exactly what they're doing if you look at the back here there's actually little I are stickers place them each key and when you press a note it reveals itself to the infrared camera on the back of the red controller which you then stick in the back of the piano like this and then you just put the keys back in here press a note which will then make a sound so there's also these little IR knobs that you can add into the piano and they each have their own combination of IR stickers so depending on which one you put in it'll change the sound of the toy piano so here's one of my favorites which is the old man voice and here's another cute one cat sounds so this isn't actually gonna like help us make music but I thought it was pretty fun so something that is going to help us make music is this little lever here which when you press it it changes the octave or lets you bend the pitch of a note like this and one of the biggest challenges of making a lab old band was choosing a song that was easy enough to play so I decided to go with Rainbow Connection which kind of happens mostly on one octave except for this B note that I need right here so to do that I'm going to press this lever with the C sharp to get a B so that was a easy part now let's put this aside to move on to the hard part which was making the guitar and this had not come with the variety kit we had to go and make this on our own our again our superstar meg she signed this guitar and made it out of a bunch of popsicle sticks and it's very much the kind of DIY that Nintendo is encouraging I can imagine I'd be pretty fun to make this with your kids or really fun for adults who love arts and crafts this was the fun part and this next part of actually programming the chords broke me so this is toy con garage and basically how it works is with a series of notes so let's start with an input which in our case is a touch box and we're going to connect that to an output which is making a sound and you can customize what kind of sound you want there's different keys guitar sounds you can customize how long you want the sound to be played so I'm gonna go ahead connect these boxes here and that's what happens when you touch it so I want to make this look a little bit more like a guitar and what you can do is stretch out this touch bar so it looks more like a string and you can go ahead and copy these notes here and then I'm just gonna figure out exactly what notes are in a G chord and you can also change the octave of the keys so I need to make sure all these octaves are correct for the chord and I'm not a guitar player so I have to look up no a G chord I'm doing this right so actually I don't like that guitar sound I'm gonna change it to an acoustic guitar sound so that was just one G chord and if you want to play a song like Rainbow Connection you have to program like six or seven different chords and I just want to show you guys what that looks like on the screen because it was a nightmare basically I had to program different buttons to play a different chord and I was kind of like running out of space here so you can see I like cheated a little bit and made one touch bar play like six different notes um yeah I took every brain cell I have to learn how to do this so this is the programming mode and now we're gonna go to play mode which clears the screen and lets you play without moving any of the notes around so if I press this button that place and ecord this is a G chord and that's a minor so I feel like I'm like getting the hang of this but I really think that I probably could have learned to play a real guitar in the time it took me to program this on the switch one two three four so making a song on the labo is just scratching the surface of all the things you can do with Twix on garage Nintendo lab Oh isn't just about cardboard it's an experience that's centered around learning and whatever you decide to do with it is up to you I decided to make a song on the level I love it it's my baby very proud of what I've done maybe like overly proud but I'm sure like within a few days the creative community is gonna be able to come up with some pretty cool things for it so if you like Nintendo labo and you want to check out more video game content check out our sister site polygon comm there are weird on hilarious cousins we love them and I think you'll love them too