All things considered, what are your thoughts on the Kinect device?
When I first saw it displayed with the Project Milo presentation, I was pretty interested in what it had to offer. After a year and a half on the market, I'm rather disappointed to see that the highest rated game for it is sitting at an 85% on Gamerankings.com, and it is a dance game.
I think there was a lot of self-inflicted damage surrounding the Kinect.
Primarily what I mean by that is, they shouldn't have advertised it as, "you are the controller". I think they shot themselves in the foot with that statement alone. That one simple statement limited an endless amount of possibilites to basically a dance game peripheral capable of doing some on-rail segments.
If they had just cut that statement out, and allowed for things like a navigation controller at the very least, a lot more possibilities would be available.
As it stands right now, developers are struggling to even find a way to implement it into core games. It's not like the Move where you can easily incorporate it into many core games that aren't entirely based on motion controls.
The Kinect is sort of in a position where it has alienated itself from everything. It is so limited that you can't have a first person shooter and implement Kinect controls into it like you can with the Move. Everything that deals with the Kinect needs to be built from the ground up for Kinect, and be Kinect exclusive. The Wii has proven its functionality across multiple genres, showing implementation in great AAAAE Mario games, Zelda games, core games that the fans love. The Move is basically the same thing as a Wii Motion Plus, so they both have functionality, diversity, and can be applied to many different types of games and genres, they don't alienate themselves.
18 million sold is quite impressive for the amount of time that it has been on the market, but we have yet to see a steady stream of software for it. In all honestly, the vast majority of software for it is shovelware. I think Kinect could have greatly benefited from a navigation controller, and a design that didn't alienate it from core games. If you could use Kinect for core games like you can use the Move for core games, I think it wouldn't be looked at as the joke that people see it as now, a device with a bunch of shovelware to play, the highest rated game being a dance game.
I have played many hours of Kinect at Microsoft Studios, right on the campus of Microsoft Headquarters in Washington State. I've been playing games since the Atari and NES, when they were relevant, so I've been playing games for about 23 years. I've never played anything like Kinect before, and I was having a hard time summarizing my thoughts on it in a simple paragraph, but this one user gave the perfect explanation of it, and it mirrored my thoughts perfectly.
Seeing as it's restrictive as hell regarding room requirements (staging) and plagued with latency and accuracy issues, I'd say it doesn't even qualify as a good gimmick. A buddy emailed me a review recently where the reviewer actually made the case that a reason a Kinect game was good was due to the fact that the player couldn't really lose when Kinect fuc*ed up recognizing player movement. To me, that's not even up for debate -- that is a BROKEN CONTROL APPARATUS when reviewers have to wait for games in which the player can't be penalized to justify its existence.
I don't know any better way to put it: Kinect is trash. Cancerous trash. Broken controls that do not work 100 percent of the time are trash. The player having to wonder whether his input is going to be recognized (and properly discerned) by the computer is trash. The player having to wait for his input to register on screen is trash. That's not hyperbole -- that is coming from someone who has held controllers of different makes and styles in his hands for damn near 35 years and who knows the fundamental, most basic, most absolutely necessary component of a controller is that it works -- flawlessly. Watching people flail around with this thing trying to explain away all its deficiencies in the name of mindless entertainment baffles me, honest to God. I don't call it trash to be mean, I call it trash because that is the best descriptor when qualifying it as a control mechanism.
Shame-usBlackley
The controls are just so far from precision and 100% reliability, that I don't see how it could really be implemented into a core game. For people out there who enjoy a challenge, enjoy topping leaderboards, enjoy competition, enjoy playing games to get a sense of true accomplishment and satisfaction, I just don't see how the Kinect could be a good thing. When you're getting beaten down from the controls and not the game itself, I can't think of anything more frustrating. People always say the greatest games are the games that when you lose, when you die, you know it was your fault, and you can learn from your mistakes. But when you are losing because the game is cheap, or the controls are broken, that's an entirely different story.
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