If you had told me last year that Nex Playground would outsell Microsoft’s Xbox, even by a couple of weeks, I would have run out of the room laughing.
It’s a three-inch cube of a gaming console, and likely less powerful than your phone, which uses a single camera to track your body. It is operated only by sponsored, Certified and safe for children games. Although often compared to the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, the Nex Playground is worse at motion tracking than either of them.
It’s also not cheap: $250 up front plus $89 annual subscription or $49 per quarter to get more than just the basic sampler. If you love a game, you can’t buy it separately. Many of them are little better than shovel tools, and most are graphically ugly; I haven’t tried a single game that has the charm or grace of Nintendo or the best of Apple Arcade.
However, as my five-year-old lay in bed sick with a 99-degree fever, she begged me to let her play.
When we started virtual bowling, even Grandpa wanted to join in never He wants to come in.)
“I want to try again!” said my nine-year-old daughter, after sending her low-rent plane to doom.
They didn’t care that the games were bad. They made sure they were very easy to pick up and play, with no controller or experience necessary, on a big screen. They raved that the toys made them dance, jump and swing their arms, and that their father looked very funny doing the same.
I just hope the games don’t make them cry too.
Nearly 20 years ago, the Nintendo Wii put an infrared camera and accelerometer in your hand to tell whether you were moving your arm quickly, slowly, closer or farther, and track cardinal direction. A few years later, Microsoft’s Kinect was able to capture images of your entire body without any controller at all: it painted your room with a structured pattern of infrared light to estimate the position of your skeleton in 3D space.
The Playground is different: a single wide-angle camera on the front, an HDMI and USB-C port on the back, and nothing else to connect. But it also doesn’t “see” 3D depth. It should estimate your body position from flat images.
Sometimes, it’s impressive: By selecting just six joints—shoulders, elbows, and hands—you can throw a bowling ball straight down the lane or move it left and right. But with no real depth perception, I could easily get confused: My nine-year-old couldn’t sit on the couch while my five-year-old was bowling several feet in front of him, because the playground assumed all his limbs belonged to the same person. My youngest daughter cried for several minutes when the eldest raised her hand and accidentally stole her turn.
It was soon her turn to cry, too, when the playground lost her hand mid-swing and sent her ball crashing into the gutter. I was angry when it happened again.
there So There are many things that can confuse single-camera tracking, and Nix knows it. Warnings include: Do not wear clothing with repeating patterns. Do not wear long sleeves. Play in a well-lit room, but no behindlit. “Avoid non-players in the camera view.”
All of these things help one camera tell people about their background, but parents know some of them are harder than they seem! Our kids get playtime after their evening bath, which means pajamas. Have you seen the children’s pajamas? They have long sleeves and repeating patterns. hearts. The stars. Smiling faces. Repeat Cats and Unicorns until the cows come home.
We had to roll up our sleeves and rethink seating. Realistically, “avoiding non-players in camera view” meant clearing the entire living room of anyone who wasn’t bowling, and having them stand off to the side, so the camera wouldn’t suddenly pan to the wrong person mid-play. Sometimes we can sit on the couch with our hands hidden behind blankets or laptops.
However, my kids were often very frustrated with the controls. “I can’t keep my hand still! I can’t keep it still!” My five-year-old complained about trying to send her cute puppy for treatment at Nix Spa Nintendogs-Like a game. Not many games punish kids for waving their arms wildly, but some inexplicably require dragging the cursor to press virtual buttons.
It also feels like the gaming arena lags my movements, even connected directly to a low-latency OLED TV with Game Mode turned on. In the Nex kart racing game, I couldn’t turn the wheel as quickly as I wanted in the fastest 150cc mode.
Once again, these issues did not prevent us from having fun, especially when it comes to games that do not require precision. Kids had fun with Mirrorama, Which turns your TV into a giant mirror with magical camera filters that allow kids to catch a lightning bolt from their hands, stretch their faces, quickly blur it like Sonic the Hedgehog, and dance with their own version.
The Mirrorama above made my kids laugh the most.
They had fun Copy catwhere they just had to strike a funny cartoon pose and let the AI judge who did it better. Meanwhile, I found Breakbuster To be an excellent clone of Breakout – just move your body left or right to move the paddle, which is quite large, and the exciting multi-ball movement makes it fun.
I can’t say we’ll get our money’s worth, because many of the games are unreasonably simple and repetitive, or – like Contact 4 Bouncewhere my child and I gave up trying to get the balls to even get in – which was frustrating from the start. Many sports games are either laughably easy or have a huge learning curve because the camera can’t see depth, so it can’t detect how to hit the ball. In tennis, for example, you can’t aim with your arm: it only controls the timing of your swing. You have to move the rest of your body to aim left or right.
One of Nex’s biggest marketing points is that it has already attracted huge kids brands to the platform: Bluey, Peppa Pig, Gabby’s Dollhouse, Sesame Street, How to Train Your Dragon, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But my kids weren’t necessarily sold.
Bluey, is one of the best licensed experiences – but my Bluey-loving kids weren’t that into it.
They seemed intrigued at first Unicorn Academybut they were soon disappointed when they couldn’t ride the unicorn anywhere interesting. TMNT is a frustrating endless runner where you have to constantly jump in the air to clear obstacles, though I think that might help tire out my kids. Although they love bluishMy kids quickly asked me to stop the very repetitive balloon jumping game.
There’s enough in the Playground library that I bet your kids will find it Something They are having fun. My older daughter wants to visit her puppy, and one night while eating dinner, my younger daughter burst into exclaiming, “Bowling!!! I love bowling!!!” When we said we might play it again. Despite countless tracking failures, they say the Knicks Flappy Bird Clone, where up to four people jump into the air to keep their dragons eating fruit instead of crashing into towers, is one of their favorites.
I think Playground offers too much money for an almost inadequate game. But it seems that the fun is not just about the quality of execution. Many classic arcade games are frustratingly unfair, even broken – but sometimes you just need another turn to beat the machine.
Photography by Sean Hollister/The Verge