My first game I decided to test is the ridiculously heartwarming sickeningly sweet game Kinectimals. Let me first add my intention of buying this was solely to entertain my 3 year old niece. I swear! The only easy thing about this game from moment 1 is hitting the close tray button to turn it on. Purchasing one of the collector’s editions with the plush Maltese Tiger I start off trying to scan my little tag to get him in game. This proves extremely difficult as the controls of this game are awful. Swiping through menus is slow and if you go too fast it freaks out and just stops. Incidentally, I don’t know what a Maltese Tiger really looks like but my guess is it’s not powder blue like this one in the box, but it’s still cute. After the debacle of getting in to the game I am staring at this little cub, and he (at least I assume a he) is looking back at me with puppy dog eyes. Now a magical flying little rat shows up to be my guide through this journey. He proceeds to tell me some story about how the animals all live on this island alone waiting for some guy to come back. Finally we get to a point where I actually do something, name the blue thing. My initial name tries were rejected until a random name finally stuck, which turns out is meaningless. , which turns out is meaningless. 20 minutes in to the game now and I finally get some kind of interaction with my pet. I will leave out the long boring mini game details but the basics are throwing things that they may or may not bring back, phantom driving things in circles, and using a magnifying glass to find buried stuff that they won’t ever dig up. You can however teach him tricks with hand signals and voice commands, but they will only work during the specific missions. Maybe if I finished all the missions it would have opened up the world more but I just could not suffer through it anymore.
Eventually I tried switching the sensor from the bottom of the tv to the top which made it a little easier to use but, in the end Kinectimals is a great idea that fell way short of what it could have been. Suffering from poor controls and too linear of a storyline, I would recommend renting or maybe even passing on this one all together.
That's how this gamer sees it.
-Pimpnelli
After a few days playing with Kinect I have decided to finally give some insight on Microsoft and motion control. The setup at first glance seemed easy to do, plug it in, turn on your system, and put in the included game/setup drivers. I put it under my tv like all my other sensors have gone. Kinect does this almost scary initial scan looking me up and down, almost like leering at me. Then the fine tuning begins with every setting possible having its own menu. After the initial scan you move on to the audio. First you set up the microphone and your typical background noise check and say your listed nonsensical phrase, nothing new here. Kinect having already looked at my living room starts listening to itself and making these musical tones out of various speakers to find where the walls are. A little more interesting than a normal setup now. Finally we reach the Kinect ID phase, which was one of the coolest and creepiest features listed. A little grid comes up with a picture of my avatar. This is where I must admit I do not have a Kinect friendly playspace, it’s not enough distance from my tv to me so I can already see something not working right. After about 10 tries to set up this I give up and just move on to actually do something. I make it to the Kinect Hub which is a much simpler and basic version of the menu and I go through this mini tutorial on what does something. I start trying to move things with gestures, slowing down until Kinect and I decide what speed will work for us both. It’s like any good relationship, we need to compromise. Menus start getting easier to navigate and I’m learning what to do. Now I start testing the voice functionality. “XBOX… ESPN” my new go to phrase as it turns out in a bit, comes up immediately. I’m a pro at this having navigated my first menu and told my xbox what to do. A stroke of luck, I have some friends on who have just bought their Kinect too, time to do some more testing! We have come to my first problem with my new toy. Yes we can chat with each other but it sounds like we’re on speakerphone halfway across the room, so it works but not usably.
Cut to the next day, house to myself every item in my living room moved to make this the best playspace I can. I start to try this Kinect ID thing again with the same results. Finally a stroke of genius as I invent a way to get every inch possible away from this thing. Pushing tables aside, crawling and leaning awkwardly around other furniture, my scan ballet completes. After several hours over 2 days… success!! P.S. Eventually I figure out the top of my tv works better than the bottom, but that did not significantly affect the performance of the Kinect Hub. That's how this gamer sees it.
-Pimpnelli
Finally Kinect is just a few days away. The excitement has been building for almost a year between all the press events and trailers, and coming down to the wire I wonder what does Kinect offer that the Wii and PS Move don’t already have weeks, months, and years sooner. Before the Wii came along, I was one of the 5 people who bought the Eye Toy for the PS One. It was slow to react and only sensed wide grandiose gestures like an old world Italian family arguing. Flash forward to the Eye Toy 2, a little better but still absolute crap. The big failure was for both the Eye Toys was they had all of 3 games, and they were all the same. After those huge flops in motion control Sony flat out said motion is a gimmick and real gamers would never use it. Cut to 2006… September, Microsoft unveils the Xbox Live Vision, which turns out to be for all intensive purpose the Eye Toy 3. With the addition of the same 3 Eye Toy games and the ability to video chat to one of the other 10 people on Xbox Live who bought it or even play Texas Hold’Em or Uno to watch if someone is bluffing. I used it twice, once to take a new profile picture and once on a game to make sure it worked. November, The Wii shows up and Nintendo changes what the world considers a game. With the first free game included in a system since Mario, Wii Sports is still one of the most popular games on the system. Sales of Wii skyrocket and people from 10-100 scramble to get their hands on it. I myself even made up an elaborate story about a fictional wife making me sleep on the couch until I die if I forgot to get it for my fictional son’s birthday. Luckily after calling every retailer I could think of it worked on some poor pathetic Blank’s Blank employee. Sony and Microsoft after the huge failures of motion control write off Wii and go about their business models like it doesn’t exist until they lose billions in revenue. Cut to 2010… Sony brings out the PS Move in what could be the most underwhelming media blitz ever, I didn’t know it had even come out until I saw it in a weekly ad. Sony’s all but forgotten the merciless attacks on the Wii and now has a controller that looks exactly like the Wiimote but with a cute colored globe on top. The first thing Sony has going for the PS Move is the fact that Sony fanboys are loyal to the grave. The final thing, the better control gives it the ability to be used in real games and is even launching with a top shelf exclusive first person shooter under its belt. Finally at long last the history lesson is over and we’re 3 and a half days from Kinect. Their tag lines are many but I personally liked “Who would have thought you would grow up to be a controller.” Kinect allows you to voice control your Xbox, and every aspect of Xbox can be controlled by motion. Besides the obvious cool factor of your Xbox now the closest you will get to living out your Minority Report fantasies, It also has a kind of Skynet always watching you vibe to it. I will reserve judgment until the day it comes out, but I for one am excited to be a controller instead of just throwing one. That's how this gamer sees it.
