Kinect Humble Pie - Or how the Kinect is pretty damn good!
I wasn't a naysayer as such, I just underestimated the value of honest-to-goodness-fun-games. I wished for the Kinect for Christmas, not really for myself, but so that my wife and 2 year old son could perhaps join me in my hobby of choice a little more often. For my son I bought Kinectimals of course, and My Shape - Fitness Evolved for the wife to go along with the bundled Kinect Adventures.
My hopes were for an better than Wii experience and I can say it has been achieved!
The good:
- Compared to anything else I have tried, the Kinect is the most accurate system on the market. Not only that but the range of motion of all parts of the body that's captured is incredible!
- Our living room's shape means that we are a bit borderline on space. That means that typically the top half of a player's head and anything below the ankles is not visible to the Kinect, yet it still manages to guess where those parts are. I am waiting for the wall mount to arrive which should give an extra 2 ft of play space.
- The games: Honestly, Wii Sports will never be played in our house again after also buying Kinect Sports! Rare did a great job of making this an "easy to play, hard to master" game in the mould of Nintendo classics, whilst being extremely entertaining at the same time. Kinectimals is a very high production value game perfectly suited to 3-7 year olds, whilst still being fun even for me to play. Even Kinect Adventures is a decent amount of fun.
- A 2 year old can use it. Sure I haven't been able to get him to stand there and do all the calibration, but he his happy enough playing dead with his Kinectimals tiger and can even do the swipe gestures to select different things on the screen
- Fitness games are a home-run on this system - no balance boards, no switching this controller to that controller with dongle A, B or C attached.
The Bad:
- Sure there is a little input lag, but nothing like claimed by some. It's probably between 0.25 and 0.5 seconds and most games compensate for it very well.
- Why do I have to sign in seperately for Kinect and Xbox?? This is sooooo annoying and pointless!
- Some games cheat a little with multiplayer. For instance 2 player Table Tennis, both players are rooted to the spot and cannot move around the table like in single player.
- The price. I bought it as a standalone add-on to my 360s and it was about 33% too expensive even for an early adopter. For mass-market penetration the price needs to be halved!
The Hopes:
- Fun family games are already this system's forte, but we need some more 'serious' games
- That Kinect will not be limited to games without a controller. Simple uses such as the Kinect being used to mirror head movements and look around the cockpit of a jet fighter or car in Forza 4 would be a simple but brilliant use for the system.
- That the hype and heavy marketing continues. Lots of people are not sold on the Kinect… until they try it. Then even the biggest doubters are extremely impressed. More units sold, means more developers taking it seriously and even more creative uses.