The Hardware
When the first thing an entertainment device tells me is that I may need to adjust the furniture to fully experience it, I get a little hesitant. Lucky for me, my room of doom is modular, and my couch fits well against the wall. Similar to a Terminator becoming sentient, there is a lengthy calibration process to get the technology familiar with its surroundings that needs to be done before getting into the Kinect experience.
The Kinect unit plugs into the Xbox 360 via USB and into a wall adapter. The first thing that caught me off guard was that the device can look up and down. I get a strong Johnny Five vibe out of it when I witness it, and it’s still kind of creepy watching it swivel and pivot to keep me in its view. A downside to this cool tech is that unlike my PlayStation Eye that can sit stable on top of my TV for a greater viewing angle, the Kinect needs to be on a sturdy surface to operate, usually in front of my TV, blocking some of its view of the floor, thus not accurately knowing where my feet are. While it does a good job guessing, the avatar on screen sometimes gets a bit club footed when it has to guess which direction my feet are pointing.
The Software & Expierence
If you remember the scene in Minority Report where star Tom Cruise uses hand gestures to collate and review case evidence, you will be familiar with how you interact with Kinect. It takes over your Xbox 360 dashboard and introduces voice command and hand gesture controls. You can tell it to do things such as play a disc, explore demo content and make an Earl Grey Tea, hot. The one thing missing is the ability to turn your Xbox 360 on or off via voice command.
As the unit costs $149, I only played the included Kinect Adventures.
Kinect Adventures is a collection of 5 mini games requiring you to perform various body contortions to score points.You control a downhill river rafting adventure, a break-out clone where your body is the paddle, and a poor soul trapped in an underwater glass box constantly plugging leaks caused by the creatures of the deep. While there isn’t much depth to the game play, it was a fun and if you have enough room, it will be a blast to play with two people.
The Future
Stepping back a few feet from the latest lineup of motion controlled games, the divide is obvious. On one side, we have the Kinect, with a very kid friendly facade with games such as Kinectimals and Dance Central. On the other side we have the PlayStation 3 and it’s Move Controllers alongside games such as the Danny Trejo hosted beat-em-up The Fight Lights Out, the massively multi-player war shooter MAG and the forthcoming M rated sci-fi shooter sequel Killzone 3.
As the trend towards multi-platform releases continues, I foresee a challenge and a divide that will form as it may prove difficult for publishers to get the most bang for their developmental buck as the traditional controller is no longer in play and the two next gen motion control systems differ so much
Both companies have some pretty advanced tech going on under the hood, and it seems to me that they aren’t pitting themselves against each other, but taking a slice of the pie away from Nintendo and showing the big N that the world is ready for a Wii 2.
– The Jolly Gamesman
~The Fine Print~
Kinect for Xbox 360
$149.00 (Includes Kinect hardware and Kinect Adventures)
