Like many of my fellow Xbox 360 owners we now have a Kinect at home. The good news is it just works. The bad news is that it makes you do things like this.
I was interested to see how the predlets took to it. They really wanted to play the raft game as that is what they has seen Sy and I play on The Cool Stuff Collective so they did have some advance notice about how it should work.
It worked well setting up their accounts and it also coped well with the relative size differences between us all.
Kinect adventures was an instant hit and playable by everyone. Dance Central though is the killer app IMHO. When elemming came home from work she ended up spending a few hours grooving away, and unlike me was a natural at it.
The Fighters Uncaged game seems the weakest of the bunch we had, it felt it should be better, it is still fun hitting and kicking but you have to be a bit more careful with your form and what registers. Also the side effect of no controller is of course no force feedback or rumble that you tend to get in a fight game. This is not an issue in a dance game as, well, you are dancing. Obviously also the fight game needs to cope with any move any time but the dance can have a rough idea about where you should be and adjust its tolerances accordingly.
A quick demo of Joyride proved to me that I do not want to spend hours not holding a fake steering wheel, though there is a request from predlet 2.0 to have a go at that so I will see how he gets on.
Kinectimals has only just arrived in the post so I will hold fire on commenting, though I think it will be brilliant 🙂
Andy Piper was online on kinect last night but as we were exploring the games and bouncing around we did not get to try the video kinect, but the usual thing on xbox of getting a message, finishing what you are doing and then routing around to find the request or message which by that time the person has gone to do something else. So apologies Andy 🙂
If you have an xbox 360 there really is no reason to not have a Kinect, if you have kids all the better. It will be interesting to see the control methods get used in interesting ways over the next few years too, and maybe it evolve to the desktop and let us control many other devices.
Just look at the wonderful Amazon.com reviews for Kinect (mostly 5 stars). many people I know are also uploading many Kinect videos on youtube. All smiles and laughs. You have to give MS their props. It’s a hit.
Shame not to get the chance to test Video Kinect. From the sound of the audio messages I think it will probably be a bit echoey. Anyway I think the killer app here is the integration with Windows Live Messenger – video chatting from the couch to the desktop to the phone. That’s pretty compelling.
Fun device. I now need a larger room… 🙂