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| I was never good at Javelin at school |
As we settled down in the darkened, eerily silent Convention Centre after hours, something dawned on me – we’d get to experience Kinect without all the noise and hustle and bustle of the show. It was a pure experience, and one I’m glad we got to have. During our time in the empty LACC we got to go hands on with Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures, Kinectimals, Dance Central and Kinect Joy Ride in a more intimate appointment with less time constraints.
Playing all of these key pillar Kinect games back-to-back gave me a lot more perspective on the general performance of the device, and in the end I was left thoroughly impressed. Kinect has to be viewed with one clear, key caveat – its applications for normal, traditional games are currently limited. With the way it controls and the fact that it struggles to read the human skeleton sitting down, the chances of using Kinect in Halo or Gears of War any time soon are thin.
However, its applications as a group device, party device or family device are huge. The first, interesting thing I learned about Kinect was that the base is motorized – as I stepped into view it pivoted down slightly to bring my entire body into view – I was shorter than the person who used it last. The motor can only move the camera up or down, but the Microsoft rep informed us that the wide lens view of the camera allows it to track in a limited range left or right as well, as was demonstrated on Tuesday at the Microsoft Media Briefing.
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| Now Bowling, this I was good at |
The first game up was Joy Ride, which was surprisingly accurate. While there’s no manual acceleration, the Kinect control for racing titles has come on leaps and bounds from the rather messy but impressive Burnout tech demo I played last year at E3, and I quickly found myself able to effectively control my vehicle without careering off-track.
One of the most fun ideas in Joy Ride is the idea that leaning into a turn has an effect – while your hands control the steering, leaning directly into your turn kicks the back of your car out in a drift. A similar effect can be seen when you hit jumps on the track, where moving about can trigger tricks by the characters in the cars. Boosting is controlled by simply drawing your hands back to your chest and thrusting them back out again. No accuracy in steering seemed to be lost in boosting, and you can corner and drift accurately while also kicking off a boost easily.
The accuracy of the device was tested pretty well by Joy Ride as well, as there were coins to pick up on track. I’m not sure what effect these had on gameplay, but I used them as a chance to test out how easy it was to do accurate, pinpoint steering, and while it wasn’t as clean-cut as a controller to use it was definitely very accurate considering I wasn’t holding anything in my hands. Similar tests of accuracy would come from Kinect Sports, which had us bowl and race in the hurdles. The bowling disappointed me in one respect but greatly impressed me in another. The disappointment came from the lack of a run-up – taking steps back and stepping into your bowl had little to no effect on the gameplay, which is a shame considering the full body tracking Kinect offers.
On the flip side I was left greatly impressed by just how natural putting spin on the ball was with Kinect. I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but I found that bowling just as I do in real life has the same effect, and after two gutter balls I found my mark and style of throw and was netting strikes and spares with curved, spun shots. All this is mostly positive so far, but it is also worth noting that Kinect has its downsides, even for party games. The timing on the jumps during hurdles seemed to be off – in fact, I felt like there was significant lag – and everyone in the room struggled with the jogging on the spot the game requires.
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| Don't try this at home, kids |
For a start, jogging on the spot meant everyone was gradually, slowly moving forwards, and eventually they’d move so far forwards that the Kinect sensor would ward them off and tell them to move back – human error, but only natural when you’re trying to jog as fast as possible. The other issue came for one of the other journalists in the room, who was wearing a long skirt. Unable to figure out exactly where her legs were, Kinect resorted to making vague approximations as her avatar character’s legs flailed unnaturally on the screen. Clearly, there are still bugs to be ironed out.
As fun as the other titles were, the highlight of my Kinect experience was undoubtedly Dance Central. Thematically similar to the Wii’s Just Dance but with full body motion sensing, Dance Central displays dance moves on the right of the screen and a character on the left, and between them they give an accurate display of what moves you could be doing.
Perhaps it was just the atmosphere in the room of excited people having fun, but Dance Central absolutely seemed to be uncompromisingly accurate at reading the moves and could do for dancing games what Guitar Hero did for peripheral based music games – take a formula experimented with by Konami and others in arcades and at home and do right by it. Here’s hoping that when it finally ships it might get an upgrade to support two players, as while others can join in Kinect will only track one player at a time. The promise of a Rock Band style music store excites me, too.
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| Duck |
All in all, Kinect definitely feels like it delivers on a decent number of the ideas and promises put forward last year and turned out to be pleasantly surprising for me – honestly, I went in expecting the worst. There are still distinct issues – notably the inability to sit down for all but the most rudimentary of actions – but Microsoft reps ensured us that much of this would be ironed out in time for launch.
