The Potential of AR Games

AR cards aren’t being discussed as much as they deserve to be. While AR isn’t new technology, it is new for Nintendo, and how Nintendo is approaching AR is certainly different.

While I do not own a 3DS, I have had the opportunity to use the handheld at various Nintendo demo events. When it was time to demo the AR cards, I was always pleasantly surprised.

Before the 3DS launched, Nintendo hardly talked about the AR cards. Naturally this was because they were focusing their promotional campaign on the 3D aspect of the system. When they did bring up the AR cards, they primarily discussed the included-in-box character cards instead of the included AR game.

I found the AR game extremely enjoyable, and this comes from someone who is generally bored by casual games. But because the game was so different from any game I had formally played, it was extremely engaging. The AR game could be the Wii Sports of the 3DS, especially if Nintendo decides to release more cards and updates for the game.

But where the real potential lies is in the character cards. The 3DS came boxed with a character card of Link, Samus, Mario, Kirby, and the Pikmin. When activated these cards would produce a three-dimensional version of the character, which you could then pose alongside various real-life items and situations, but nothing much besides that. These character cards were just a fun treat, but they weren’t a video game.

But now we have the announced Kid Icarus: Uprising character AR cards.

Above is a new look at the battle card game that will come packaged with the Kid Icarus 3DS game. However, after looking at the footage, there doesn’t appear to be any controls for the game. In fact, it doesn’t appear to be a game at all. All the player does is switch up the cards and push “A” to start a video with a randomly selected winner.

Now, imagine Nintendo developing this battle card game further, so that the player actually controls the characters. Better yet, the player has the ability to choose from a list of actions, similar to actual trading card fighting games, like Magic: The Gathering. It’d be a way to bring trading card games to life, and it would be immensely popular. But the way Nintendo could make bank on this idea can be summed up in one word: Pokemon.

The minute Pokemon was brought up during the E3 press conference, something in my brain just clicked. Why not make Pokemon AR cards that would allow battles between friends?. What if you could collect the cards, and do more than just battle with them? If there wasn’t an opposing trainer around to battle with, you could still load up your AR Pokemon and feed them and play with them, sort of like a Gigapet; this would result in some sort of leveling. And wouldn’t it be great if your AR pokemon recognized that the same trainer owned them? They could interact with each other; different from the way they’d act with rival pokemon.

There are so many Pokemon, that Nintendo really could bring home the cash on this one, that is, if they properly advertise it and boost their 3DS sales.

Furthermore, this doesn’t have to stop with Pokemon. Imagine a series of Zelda cards that come with the inevitable Zelda 3DS game. You could have Link and Ganondorf battle it out on your kitchen table or on your cat’s head. The possibilities are endless.

I want to hear what all you lovely readers think about this, so, in the comments, tell me what you’d like to see from AR cards in the future.

UPDATE: I have since learned that the new Pokedex 3DS App utilizes AR technology. In fact, it allows you to load all your collected Pokemon from one easy-to-print card. However, it doesn’t appear that these Pokemon can interact with each other. Perhaps an future software update will solve this.