The sold-out Nex Playground made my kids laugh and cry

If you had told me last year that the Nex Playground would outsell Microsoft’s Xbox even for two weeks, I would have laughed as I walked out of the room.

It’s a three-inch cube of a gaming console probably less powerful than your phone, which uses a single camera to track your body. He only plays games selected and certified safe for children. Although frequently compared to the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, the Nex Playground is worse than either when it comes to motion tracking.

It’s not cheap either: $250 up front more Annual subscription for $89 per year or $49 per quarter to get more than a basic sampler. If you like a game, you can’t buy it separately. Many are little better than shovelware and most are graphically ugly; I haven’t tried a single game with the charm or refinement of Nintendo or the best of Apple Arcade.

And yet, sick, bedridden with a 99-degree fever, my five-year-old daughter begged me to let her play.

When we started a virtual bowling game, even Grandpa wanted to join. (Grandfather Never wants to come in.)

“I want to try again!” said my nine-year-old daughter, after sending her cheap plane crashing.

They didn’t care if the games were bad. They wanted them to be very easy to pick up and play, with no controller or experience needed, on the big screen. They cared that the games made them dance and jump and swing their arms, and that their dad looked pretty funny doing the same.

I just wish the games didn’t make them cry too.

Nearly 20 years ago, the Nintendo Wii put an infrared camera and accelerometer in your hand to track whether you moved your arm quickly, slowly, closer or further away, and follow the basic orientation. A few years later, Microsoft’s Kinect captured your entire body without any controller: 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 and HDMI and USB-C power on the back, nothing else to plug in. But it doesn’t “see” 3D depth either. It should estimate your body pose from flat images.

Sometimes it’s impressive: by identifying just six joints (shoulders, elbows, hands), you can throw a bowling ball straight into the lane or spin it left and right. But without real depth perception, things can easily get confusing: My nine-year-old couldn’t sit on the couch while my five-year-old played several meters in front of him, because the playground assumed all of his limbs belonged to the same person. My youngest cried for several minutes when the oldest raised her hand and accidentally stole her turn.

Soon, it was the eldest’s turn to cry too, when Playground lost her hand in mid-swing and sent her ball into the gutter. She got angry when it happened again.

There is SO A lot of things can disrupt a single camera’s tracking, and Nex knows it. Warnings include: Do not wear clothes with repeating patterns. Do not wear long sleeves. Play in a well-lit room, but not backlit. “Avoid non-players in camera view.”

All of this helps a single camera identify people based on their background – but parents know some are harder than they seem! Our kids have play time after their evening bath, which means pajamas. Have you seen children’s pajamas? They have long sleeves and repeating patterns. Hearts. Stars. Smiling faces. Repeat cats and unicorns until the cows come home.

We had to roll up our sleeves and rethink the seats. In reality, “Avoid non-players in camera view” meant clearing the entire living room of anyone who wasn’t bowling, placing them far to the side, so the camera didn’t suddenly turn to the wrong person mid-game. Sometimes we might sit on the couch, hands hidden behind blankets or laptops.

Even so, my kids were often too frustrated with the controls. “I can’t keep my hand steady! I just can’t keep it steady!” » complained my five-year-old daughter, trying to send her adorable puppy for a spa treatment at Nex. Nintendogs-like a game. Many games don’t penalize kids for swinging their arms wildly, but some inexplicably require dragging a cursor to press virtual buttons.

I also feel like the Playground lags behind my movements, even plugged directly into a low-latency OLED TV with Game Mode enabled. In Nex’s kart racing game, I couldn’t turn the wheel as fast as I wanted in its fastest 150cc mode.

Once again, the issues didn’t stop us from having fun, especially with games that don’t require precision. The children had a lot of fun with it Miroirama, which turns your TV into a giant mirror with magical camera filters that let kids shoot lightning bolts from their hands, stretch their faces, blur as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog, dance with their own clone.

^{Mirrorama, above, made my kids laugh the most.}

They appreciated Copy chatwhere they just had to strike a goofy cartoon pose and let the AI ​​judge who did it best. During this time I found brick breaker to be a great Breakout clone – simply move your body left or right to move the paddle, which is a forgiving size, and the exciting multi-ball action makes it fun.

I can’t say we’ll get our money’s worth, as many games are simple and incredibly repetitive, or – like Connect 4 Bouncewhere my child and I gave up trying to get the balls in – frustrating from the start. Many sports games are either ridiculously easy or require a long learning curve because the camera can’t see depth and therefore can’t detect how you hit a 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 main marketing points is that it has already attracted huge children’s 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 kids who love Bluey weren’t really into it.}

At first they seemed fascinated by Unicorn Academybut quickly disappointed at not being able to ride the unicorn somewhere interesting. The TMNT game is a frustrating endless running game where you have to constantly jump through the air to clear obstacles, although I suppose that might help tire my kids out. And even if they like Bluemy children quickly asked me to stop his overly repetitive ball bouncing game.

There are enough in the Playground library that I bet your kids will find something they appreciate it. My oldest wants to go visit her puppy, and the other night at dinner my youngest burst out screaming, “Bowling!!! I love bowling!!!” when we said we might play it again. Despite countless follow-up failures, they say Nex Flappy Bird The clone, where up to four people jump into the air so their dragons eat fruit instead of crashing into the towers, is one of their favorites.

I think Playground costs way too much money for not enough play. But it shows that fun isn’t just about quality of execution. Many classic arcade games are frustrating, unfair, even broken, but sometimes you just want another round to beat the machine.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge