Studio of the moment, Sabec, is keeping up with its current schedule of weekly Switch releases with Spy Alarm, the latest of its ‘games’ to hit the eShop.
You might remember that Calculator blew up online a couple of weeks back (sparking a comical trend of joke reviews in the process), and this was quickly followed up by , perhaps forever cementing Sabec as a publisher of needless apps on Nintendo’s digital store. With Spy Alarm, though, the studio is at least making use of one of Switch’s underused and underrated features.
“Spy Alarm works by transmitting an invisible infra-red tripwire which if broken sounds an alarm,” the eShop listing reads. The right Joy-Con’s IR Camera comes into play here, sending out this invisible beam, and if someone or something crosses that beam, an alarm will ring out from the console.
You can choose from four different alarm sounds, and just in case you’re somehow using this for some important spy work, the app also includes an ‘intruder logger’ which will track how many times your alarm was triggered while you were away. We doubt James Bond will be downloading this for his next mission, but we guess it could be useful if you suspect your cat might be pinching snacks from your desk whenever you head out.
Spy Alarm launches for Nintendo Switch on 27th May for $9.99. Make sure to sneak into our comments section below and share your thoughts.
I dunno, if I was a kid and we were playing something like “let’s pretend to be spies”, I could see this actually being pretty awesome. Like, I can imagine one kid hiding it somewhere in the house and then, once placed, the other kids would have to try to get through the halls or stairs or whatever without tripping the alarm. Rinse and repeat.
TBH, as a child in the 80s, my friends and I would have loved having something like this to goof around with. I think the major problem with it is three-fold:
1) Everyone is going to assume it’s meant to be a serious anti-theft app.
2) I’m not sure if kids these days have the sort of imagination required to play games like the one described above (and also, get off my lawn!)
3) The price. Come on now.
At $3 I could see this being a quasi-interesting novelty purchase. I mean, you don’t have to be a kid to do something like pretend to be spies. With enough psychoactive chemicals, anything is possible. Unfortunately, you would probably need to be on A LOT of drugs to think that this would be worth $10. I’m sure there’s a market tho.
These clowns also released “Night Vision” for the obscenely high price of US$10 merely to access the functionality that Nintendo themselves built in to the Joy-Con. Even $2-$3 is insultingly expensive, and this is the sort of garbage that Nintendo should be stamping out of the eShop.
Now, the idea of a Spy Alarm could be cool if multiple right Joy-Con can be used at a time so that people can try to manoeuvre around the various “beams”, but I doubt that that is the case here. In fact, such an activity sounds like it would be a great addition to a new Wii Party or Mario Party game.
How would this even work as a “spy” option? The Switch would need to be turned on somewhere at all times as it does bugger-all in sleep mode (and close enough to the Joy-Con so that the “alarm” will sound), and both the Switch itself and the right Joy-Con will need to be fully charged as the Joy-Con can’t be plugged in to a power source while in use for the purposes of this software.
And these “developers” are laughing it up to the bank with all of the “fun” publicity for putting little to no effort in to their software, and people paying for their ridiculously overpriced garbage for S&Gs.
