My First try at Kinect

So I was at the state fair yesterday and was able to test out Microsoft's new Kinect camera. While I have to say that the idea of this technology is amazing, I cannot say that it works to anyones expectations.

Now I will admit that I did not get a long chance to play. and I only played one game. It is a roller coaster obstacle course, one of the games that will come with the new system. This is a game they they showed at the E3 conference and you can find videos of it on YouTube amongst other places. It started off a little oddly, first it was me and my wife playing and it did not pick her up at first. we had to move around a bit in the room for it to finally see her. But the big issue is we could not tell who it was seeing and who it was not. so we walked around like idiots for a second trying to figure it out. Since the girl explaining it to us could not figure it out either. But then it finally picked us up and we were able to start the game.

It starts out by having you put your hands out and pretending like your grabbing a pole. Then it counts down and you pull back as fast as you can to get yourself moving forward. you move back and forth and jump up and down dodging the obstacles. This seemed to work great at a slow speed. But then you can speed it up by doing little jumps. This is where the issues start. my first jump over something my character just hovered in the hair for a few seconds extra. This would not have been a big problem except for the fact that I hit the next two obstacles. of course by then I had to jump again and had the same issue. By then I was getting frustrated and was trying to move as fast as I could up and down and side to side and kept hitting everything. The lag was just killing me. Basically they just need to slow down the game so the camera can keep up. We finished up and found my wife had beat me by 2 coins and walked out.

We were met right at the door by a lady that explained to us about the system. I know most of the information from watching the E3 conference a few months ago when they officially announced it. My wife had not heard that much about it so I sat quietly and let the lady explain it. My wife really liked that it is voice activated. The fact that you can say "Xbox, Play movie" Is something that both of us admit is really cool. She also really liked the idea that you do not have to have the controller to play the games, even though she had the same complaints about the lag that I had.

So my conclusion is that I think somewhere the Kinect needs to fix it's code so that it will be appealing to more people than just the very casual player. I do not see a hard core player tolerating this for more than 5 min. I could see my nieces and nephews enjoying this because they do not care as much about how correct the game controls are. They just enjoy that the characters would do something when they moved in front of the camera.