In case any of you don't already know by now, I have a very strong love of Nintendo games and have a fairly large collection of Nintendo memorabilia. Everything from games, to TV shows, to comics and even toys. But when I heard about amiibo, I nearly lost my composure at the possibilities for new styles of gameplay while also supplementing my insatiable craving for all things Nintendo. These little toys which are outfitted with NFC technology can interface with a chip reader embedded within the New Nintendo 3DS XL and in the Game Pad of the Wii U, but what they specifically do changes depending on which games they are compatible with.
Depending on the game in question, amiibo can do a wide variety of things. Some examples include unlocking costumes in Mario Kart 8, activating a new game mode in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, becoming your game piece and memory card in Mario Party 10, or even act as an AI controlled character that you can customize and train in Super Smash Bros for 3DS/Wii U. Think along the lines of amiibo being DLC (Disc Locked Content) wrapped in a very nice figurine, but that's not exactly the case for amiibo tap.
Amiibo tap is a free app for the Wii U that takes advantage of the frantic spending that everyone has been doing to try and collect each and every one of the amiibo released so far. Each time you "tap" an amiibo to the sensor on the Wii U's Game Pad, you unlock a demo of a game that contains a series of scenes that can be played in three minute bursts. Every time you re-tap the same amiibo to the sensor while playing the demo, the scene changes and the timer resets back to three minutes. Now each time a new amiibo is scanned, a random new game is added to the collection in the ticker scrolling on the bottom of the screen, which also shows which amiibo must be used to access it again. Now because I have a lot of amiibo, I unlocked all thirty games without any need to borrow an amiibo from a friend. Kinda defeats the purpose though...
Now because of how new this app is and because no-one knows whether or not more game demos will be added to it in the future, it's only really best used as a "try before you buy" type program, but you can't really "try" unless you have enough amiibo to unlock everything so you can play them "before you buy." All in all, it is only really good for people like me and have a large collection of amiibo to use. Maybe you'll get some amiibo yourself so you can use this app, but until then, I'll be seeing you.
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