Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles

Pros Provides functional night vision. Records photos and videos. May encourage ninja-like behavior.

Cons Poor camera quality. May encourage ninja-like behavior. Bottom Line The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are functional toy night vision goggles that we all wish we had when we were kids.

By Will Greenwald

When I was a kid, night vision goggles were $15 glasses with LED lights and green lenses. Nowadays, kids can get actual night vision goggles. The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are functional infrared goggles reasonably priced at $59.99 (list). They let you see in the dark, watch people with various fun video filters, and record anything you see with a built-in camera.

Goggle Design
The Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles are a large hunk of black plastic with a lens and two arrays of infrared LEDs on one end, two eyepieces surrounded by a rubber shield on the other end, and a series of gray, orange, and green switches on the top surrounding a black power switch and a cover for a microSD card slot. A thin strap hangs from the sides of the goggles, letting you wear them around your shoulders. The underside holds a screwed-in battery door that covers a compartment for four AA batteries.

Like real night vision goggles, the Ultra Vision Goggles use a camera sensor and LCD screens to put a picture in front of your eyes. Since these goggles are a toy, it means the image you see is very low-resolution, and because the goggles are several inches long with the relatively narrow camera on the far end, they heavily skew your perspective and it's easy to bump into things.

Plenty of Controls
A green lever on the top of the goggles switches them into night vision mode, which makes the camera extremely infrared-sensitive and puts a green filter on the picture. This isn't just a visual trick, though; the goggles are sensitive enough to let you see in complete darkness. The right array of infrared LEDs constantly illuminates (invisibly) anything close to it, and a light switch on the top turns on the left array of infrared LEDs that have a slight red glow and can illuminate with infrared objects further away. I used the goggles in a completely dark room, and I could see it clearly with the left array turned on. The red LEDs illuminate objects too much if they're close, though, and the invisible LEDs work better in certain situations.

Photos and Videos
The goggles can capture video or still pictures in VGA (640-by-480) resolution, which is enough to give kids some fun mementos of their adventures. The image quality is predictably terrible, getting very blurry at the slightest movement, or simply because the subject shifted and you forgot to adjust the focus. In this, VGA is a functional resolution, because it's just small enough to make poor details forgivable.

The Jakks Pacific Spy Net Ultra Vision Goggles land on the ever-expanding list of toys that would have been awesome to have when I was a kid. They're a bit pricey (about as much as a PlayStation 3 game), and they might encourage your children to ambush you in the dark, but the goggles are incredibly entertaining for what, just a decade ago, would have consisted of just green lenses and a flashlight.

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Pacific Rim (for Android)

Pros Detailed graphics. Cinematic soundtrack.

Cons Repetitive backgrounds and enemies. Stationary fighting doesn't recreate the film's larger-than-life battles. Very little environmental damage. Bottom Line Pacific Rim aims to replicate rock-'em-sock-'em action of Guillermo del Toro's monster movie, but its repetitive and limited gameplay makes this a game strictly for genre fans.

By Jeffrey L. Wilson

Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's big-budget monster movie, rumbles onto Android devices as an eponymous $4.99 mobile game from Reliance Games. The action title seeks to recreate the flick's massive silver-screen jaeger-versus-kaiju battles, but the game lacks the scale, not to mention engaging gameplay, to be anything more than a stationary button-masher.

If you're expecting a knock-down, drag-out game in highly destructible environments, tread lightly; Pacific Rim is only half of that. The game offers plenty of button-mashing as you throw haymakers, evade incoming attacks, and parry blows in urban and aquatic environments, but there's a distinct lack of scale or environment. There are a few cursory buildings in the background, but you can't navigate between them or slam kaiju into them on command—you're locked into a tight combat zone. King of the Monsters for the Neo Geo, a video game from 1991, does a far superior job of emulating the giant monster battles seen in many Japanese kaiju flicks—and it's more than 20 years old.

That said, Pacific Rim does have a few attractive features. Defeating kaiju earns experience points and in-game currency (PP) used to improve a jaeger's combat prowess Pacific Rim (stronger shields, health regeneration, air strikes, new mechs). You can also use real-world cash to buy in-game money ($1.50 equals 2,000 PP). You ca Angry Birds n also earn cash by sharing kaiju data cards (via Facebook), which sometime appear after you win matches. There are also Career and Survival modes that let you engage in a single-player story or run a gauntlet, respectively.

Pacific Rim is a visually attractive game that features detailed mechs and monsters, but its backgrounds and enemies are recycled far too often for my taste. A one point, I battled the same crab-like kaiju four times in a row! That's a little insane. A cinematic score adds a sense of drama to the combat, but it isn't enough to elevate to the ho-hum fighting.

Whether or not you should buy Pacific Rim depends on how hard up you are for punching monsters in the face with a metallic fist. You will do that, but in the most repetitious manner possible. Power ups and special attacks break the tedium a bit, but only diehard kaiju fans should dive in.

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