Hey everyone! Sick of the same old formula in games? Don’t want to sit down and prevent problems such as muscle strain and looking like an idiot? Do you have SEVEN foot of space available in your house?
The idea behind Kinect was used years ago by Sony with the ‘Eyetoy’ which, despite a modicum of fun involved in cleaning windows, was a failure. SHURLY in the years since Playstation tucked eyetoy up in bed, gave it a kiss on the forehead and a hot chocolate, Microsoft, one of the premier technology innovators in the world, could have sorted out the bugs and made it work?
*sigh* alas, not. My biggest complaint with the Kinect is the amount of space required to play even the simplest of games. Seven foot of space just is not reasonable for the average Joe! Now seven foot square may not seem like an enormous amount of space, but you try mapping it out in your living room or bedroom and not collide with anything. My room is extremely commodious, but even I was hard pressed to find the required seven square foot to play (In case you care the only way I could play Kinect in my room would involve me standing on top of my bed)
Voice recognition. Nintendo tried it. It didn’t really work, it was alright, but not great. Now Kinect has the capability to turn on/off/pause/play games all with out having to stand up (erm, kind of counter intuitive isn’t it?) BRILLIANT! Well, yes, maybe untill half way through a boss fight your friend runs in and screams “XBOX OFF!”. Yeah, brilliant……
And finally. The idea of controllerless gaming is flawed from its core. Yes, there is less mess involved. And yes, it will get you up and active. But three things corrupt this idea. One, what if your disabled? I don’t think I need to say any more on this. Two, What if you want to just sit down and have a quick game? You can’t you must stand, dance around and tire yourself out. This is were the Wii (Brilliant) and Playstation move (A blatant notasgood copy) get it bang on right. You can sit down and play a game like a tried and tested controller based game or stand up, dance around like a fool and ‘get fit’. Perfect middle ground. Thirdly, games are limited. You can’t really play Tetris on the Kinect can you? Or a run and gun. Or an FPS or any game that involves your players walking being controlled by you, unless they release a Kinect treadmill: ‘Lose weight buy letting us perform open wallet surgery!’. I suppose Kinect could hold water for mass party dancing games or such like. But for home gaming, it misses the mark. Quite badly.
1/5
