- Before we even began,
David's first question to me was a hundred US dollars,
that's for two karts, right?
(laughs)
Oh David, you so silly.
'Cause you gotta remember guys all right,
this is Nintendo we're talking about.
Nintendo ones, they're 60 to what?
Like 80 US dollars for a software title.
- [David] Yeah.
- Okay and there's a software title included, plus Nintendo,
I mean they've done figurines in the past.
Hey David, do you ever go to the toy store
and see a cheap Nintendo figurine?
- [David] No.
- That's what I thought.
Now we've got a Nintendo figurine
that also happens to have a remote control car inside it,
that ain't gonna be cheap.
Yes my friends, Mario Kart live home circuit
is very expensive but it is also quite possibly
by my estimation,
the first augmented reality gaming experience
that actually matters at all.
- [David] Pokémon GO?
- Okay, Pokémon GO is sort of augmentive reality.
- [David] It's barely a game.
- Is that a game though?
- [David] It definitely mattered.
- It definitely mattered.
Okay fine, let's start with a look at the kart.
From a RC enthusiast perspective,
I would say there's not a whole lot to this puppy.
You got your rear wheel drive,
there is no differential so you're pretty much just,
you're just turning those wheels on the front.
Yep, there you go, you got a servo,
probably nothing special I would assume.
I mean, I probably could crack it open
and have a look at it but long story short,
we actually need this for an LTTE video very shortly
so I'm gonna try not to break it too hard.
So you've got a servo mounted to two non driven front tires,
tires are removable if you are into that sort of thing
I suppose.
Well what, look you want me to do,
you want me to unbox an RC car or not David?
This is my first time.
- [David] I thought you did a firetruck one time?
- Okay, I did technically unbox a firetruck
but nobody watched that.
The second tier Luigi portion of this unboxing
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Yup, that's Luigi,
it's basically the same thing but Luigi.
Okay then, to Nintendo's credit, just like their amiibos
or any other figures that they've done over the years,
the quality of the Mario figurine here
is actually really good,
like does he not look awesome?
Up here we've got your camera.
So this is where you're getting your live,
hence the name of the product,
live feed of Mario's point of view effectively
as he's ripping around on your floor
or on your porch or outside or wherever the case may be.
Actually I wouldn't recommend using it outside
because a, you can see that the karts
have extremely low clearance from the ground
and b, they have no water resistance whatsoever
and the last thing you wanna do is ruin this thing
because to my knowledge, there is no way to get a new kart
other than to buy the entire kit.
The last notable things about the kart
are the type C charger port
that is revealed by flipping up the side,
as well as the power button
that also acts as a pairing button.
So you can see, yeah, held it down,
we've got a couple of indicator lights on the backup here
and that's pretty much it, that's the kart.
So what else did we get?
Some instructions,
you download the Mario kart live home circuit game
just for free on the switch as far as I can tell.
From environmentally friendly mostly packaging
and finally ah yes,
the augmented reality games.
So the Mario Kart game would have no way
of knowing what kind of track you wanna run around on
inside your home.
So what it uses in order to blend the video game version
of what you're playing on your switch
and the reality of your home is these gates.
I actually spent a fair bit of time this weekend
playing around with it.
So it's, if you guys were wondering what the TLDR is,
it is really, really fun
but I would never play it by myself
and I will explain why in a moment, let's set up this gate.
So just like Nintendo's Labo lineup
of sort of cardboard toys that they've created in the past,
you fold together your racing gates
just by putting these tabs in here,
spreading out these ones here
and then per the Nintendo instructions,
putting something heavy on the edges.
This is actually far more important
than even they let on, because I pretty much guarantee you
as you're ripping around on the track,
you're going to run into these things
and if you hit them,
well this is an augmented reality game
so the way that the kart
actually determines what it's looking at,
is it looks at the relative position
of this graphic here on the front of the gate,
to the objects around it
to determine where the course is supposed to be.
So if you hit it and then back up,
your course is gonna be a little bit wonky now
so you wanna anchor those down real good.
These are much easier to fold the second time.
You can print out your own, Nintendo does provide templates
but obviously it's gonna be a fair bit of work
to create something that's quite as nice looking
as the stock gates.
- [David] You can buy them from Nintendo also.
- Oh, you can buy them too?
- [David] Yeah.
All right, thanks James.
You get a total of four gates
and the way that you configure your track
is you go park yourself in front of gate number one
and you'll get a prompt to press x
and then what you do is a little letiku,
it comes, put some paint on your wheels
in an obnoxiously long animation like Nintendo, come on.
Have you played the Nintendo switch Mario Party?
The endless animations and explanations
for things you already fucking know, just complete.
Anyway, the animation puts some paint on your wheels
and then you roll through gate one
and then map out whatever kind of course you like
and you can decide okay look,
I want my course to be obstruction free,
I'm just gonna do a simple loop
or you can kind of wind your way between shoes
and chair legs and all kinds of the cooler stuff
that by the way is worth it
because it ends up being a ton of fun.
The one thing to watch out for
is after you complete your course with all four gates,
unfortunately no there is no way
to add more than four gates
even if you have more than one gate,
is that if you have physical obstacles
the AI players who are augmented reality inserted
into your field of view, do not have to respect them
and they will go through them,
giving them a bit of an unfair advantage.
Now that's not to say that you can't use multiple kits
if you want.
You can actually play with up to four players,
we'll talk about that in a minute.
The last augmented reality pieces we have here
are these arrows and it's actually really cool
the way that they light up in front of you
when you're ripping around on the course
and they indicate of course, which way to go.
Now let's talk about multiplayer.
There's only two different versions available
and from my perspective, I'm sitting there going like
Nintendo you're a how many like billion dollar company,
obviously you'd have to have Bowzer.
- [David] Yoshi.
- And then Yoshi, yeah like.
- [David] Peach.
- Peach, yeah.
Yeah, how did they not have?
Okay, maybe that's their problem,
they got too many iconic characters.
Okay, I probably would have gone Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi
and feel free to fight in the comments if you disagree.
So there's only two versions of the karts
and you can play with up to four players in real time.
Now we haven't actually tried it yet
but what I'm imagining is that based on my experience
racing against the AI players,
there's pretty much no reason to use this
instead of just playing a normal Mario Kart game.
But based on my experience,
just using the camera mounted like, what is this?
Like three inches off the ground
just ripping around my house with that camera view,
it looks surprisingly good and like, it is so fun.
It's exactly like what I said it was like
back when we rigged a, an action cam to an RC car
and then like a racing wheel.
It is just a blast.
The car moves about like this,
like it's not fast but it feels like you are
flying along the floor because you're so close
to the ground and the way that Nintendo mixes in
augmented reality screen effects,
like, when you use a mushroom for example.
Yeah there's items when you use a mushroom
it like kind of whooshes past you,
makes it feel way faster than it actually is.
There's three separate race speeds,
50 CC, 100 CC and 150 CC.
Initial verdict for me is wow,
is this ever not worth a hundred dollars
for the single player experience?
But if you happen to be able to,
this is the problem with Nintendo man,
they create these amazing gaming experiences
that are like for who?
- [David] Yeah
- Like when you think back to like even trading
in the original Pokemon games,
okay so I have to have the game, I have to be super into it,
my friend has to have the game,
they have to be super into it,
one of us has to get a link cable,
we have to have coordinated ahead of time
to like buy the opposite version of the game,
we have to go get all the Pokemon the other one,
like who are you designing this stuff for?
- Out of the box, doesn't make a ton of sense,
if you happen to have a bunch of people who also own it,
who also own switches,
I mean we're talking like two grand worth of investment,
by the time you've got enough to have a four player race
it looks like it's gonna be a lot of fun,
so I'm going to go do that now.
Make sure you subscribe to Short Circuit
and don't miss the Linus tech tips video
where we're gonna have a winner
takes all four player battle to the death Mario Kart race.
- [James] To the death?
- What's that?
- To the death. - [David] To the death.
- Well not to the death but like, hey vacation time.
- [James ] To the death.
- To the death, James wants it to be to the death.
See you later.