Toys Come to Life at E3 2015
If you’re looking for family-friendly fare from this year’s E3 gaming lollapalooza, you could sum it up in just three words: toys to life.
Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Interactive
Toys-to-life (TTL) games let your kids interact with video games using plastic figurines with chips inside. Place the figure on a sensor pad connected to a PC or game console, and it instantly appears onscreen. As that character gains skills and experience, the figurine “remembers” them; so your wee ones can bring their favorite characters to their friend’s house and plop them on a new sensor, and they’ll be able to play with them using whatever skills and inventory the characters have accrued.
Since Activision introduced the concept with 2011’s Skylanders franchise, some $4 billion worth of TTL toys have been sold — a big reason why companies like Disney and Nintendo are diving in headfirst. This year’s E3 brought a slew of new additions to these existing franchises and a brand-new contender — LEGO Dimensions — that pushes the boundaries of TTL even further.
If you’ve never heard of toys-to-life games — and you have kids between the ages of 5 and 15 — brace yourself. Once your kids discover them, you may be stuck shelling out $50 to $75 for each game and an additional $8 to $15 for every new character.
Here’s what you’re in for.
Disney: To Infinity and Beyond
The first Disney Infinity set, introduced two years ago, featured iconic Disney characters — such as Woody and Buzz, Captain Jack Sparrow, and the Incredibles. Infinity 2.0, unveiled at last year’s E3, added a posse of spandex-wearing superheroes from the Disney-owned Marvel Films.
This year, Infinity 3.0 takes on Star Wars — complete with Luke, Han, Leia, Obi-Wan, and the evil Sith lord who shall remained unnamed. For a few more bucks, you can add packs with the characters from Inside Out, the amazing new film from Pixar Studios, where you can play a platform game as one of the emotions portrayed in the film (Joy, Anger, Sadness, etc). Infinity 3.0 will be available this fall.
Related: A Conversation With the Creators of Inside Out
The beautifully detailed figurines are instant collectors’ items. The games themselves are kind of meh. But each comes with a open-world Toybox mode that allows characters to interact however you like, without the burden of a story line — so you can have Ironman team up with Yoda to do battle or build stuff with Mulan and Maleficent. That’s undeniably cool.
Activision: Sky’s the Limit
The phenomenally successful Skylanders franchise now comes in six versions, featuring more than 300 wild characters with names like Kaboom, Sprocket, and Purple Flame Fire Bone Hot Dog. The games are funny, fast-paced, and creative, a big reason why Activision alone has sold more than $3 billion worth of these toys.
What’s new this year? Vehicles. Skylanders SuperChargers now lets you add cars, planes, helicopters, boats, and submarines to its collection of crazy characters. Place Stormblade (a character) next to Skyslicer (a plane) on the Skylander Portal, and he can hop inside and take it for a spin. Kids will also be able to play with the vehicles more easily when they’re not plugged into the game; the cars, for example, will have wheels that move.
SuperChargers will be available for all major game consoles and the PC in September.
Nintendo: Clinging to life
Nintendo introduced its Amiibo toys-to-life set for Wii, Wii U, and the 3DS handheld last year, with characters based on Super Mario, Kirby, Pikachu, and other ageless holdovers from the Gameboy era. This year at E3, the company introduced more than a dozen new characters and a unique twist: characters that can also live inside other TTL universes.
Through a partnership with Activision, two of the most iconic Nintendo characters, Donkey Kong and Bowser, will be playable as both Skylanders and Amiibos. Tap them on a Wii U GamePad or 3DS and they operate inside the Nintendo game universe; twist their base slightly and they become fully fledged Skylanders, able to enter the SuperChargers game on Nintendo platforms. The skills a character gains inside a Nintendo game do not transfer to Skylanders, however.
The new characters — including the two hybrids — will be available this fall.
LEGO: A new dimension
LEGO is the newest entry into the TTL sweepstakes, and in many ways it’s the most ambitious.
Like Disney games, the game draws on a huge cast of familiar characters from various LEGO sets and video games — including Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, and a whole lot more. The basic game starts with Gandalf, Batman, and Wyldstyle from The LEGO Movie on the yellow brick road, where they encounter the usual assortment of cowardly lions, dyspeptic witches, and flying monkeys, and then just gets wilder from there.
There’s a lot of plot, some complex puzzles, and the kind of irreverent and witty dialogue between characters that made The LEGO Movie so much fun.
The best part? Instead of just taking preassembled characters and the Toy Pad portal out of a box, your little gamers have to build all of them from scratch using — duh — LEGO pieces. They can take things used in the game, like the Batmobile, and reassemble them into different objects to solve new puzzles. And the Toy Pad isn’t static, either — it responds to different elements of the game by glowing different colors, forcing you to move the characters around to solve puzzles.
In other words, your kids are playing with real toys, not just the virtual ones.
Kids playing with actual toys? What will they think of next?
LEGO Dimensions will be available for all the major gaming machines beginning in September.
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