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Never has a year-ender been as exciting for the world of gaming as the one we’ve just seen. The war to get posteriors off the couch and moving in your living room is officially on with back-to-back launches of Sony’s PlayStation Move and Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect motion gaming consoles. Does Kinect’s full body ‘you are the controller’ tracking manage to best the Move’s insanely accurate controller-based tracking? After hours of backbreaking gameplay, here is my impression of Kinect and the latest motion-enabled games from Microsoft and Sony.
MICROSOFT KINECT FOR XBOX 360
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Getting started with Kinect if you have an Xbox 360 at hand is incredibly easy — just plug it in and follow the onscreen instructions to complete the short audio and camera calibration exercise. What follows is guaranteed to drop jaws across even the most hardened of tech enthusiasts — well at least till the novelty wears off. The array of cameras in the Kinect sensor essentially identifies you — the player, head, arms, legs and all — against the room background and starts responding to your movements a la Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Within minutes, you’re navigating game and Xbox menus on your TV by waving your hands in thin air, and the onscreen pointer responds appropriately without any discernable amount of lag. As with any new system, it takes a little bit of time getting used to the navigation controls, but I’ve got to say, not having to getting used to a new controller — we are, after all, intimately familiar with our appendages — is liberating.
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| Dance central |
And a wee bit tiring, to be honest. Standing in front of a camera that watches your every move, expecting you to keep doing something can be a lot of pressure. Not to forget the one major bugbear with Kinect — its camera’s viewing angle is too narrow, and it needs space. A lot of space, I kid you not. To work well, you need to put at least 6ft-8ft between you and the sensor, and have at least 4ft-5ft free on both sides if you want to engage in multi-player action, else you’ll have the controller brusquely telling you that you need to step back and into the frame.
Now I have a fairly decent-sized living room, and I was already backing into my couch well before I hit the recommended “back wall” shown by Kinect. You really do have to keep this in mind when you’re considering the purchase — the last thing you need is a console that tells you that you need a bigger house!
That said, it’s undeniable that massive amount of innovation that has gone into the making of Kinect, but all of that is only as good as the game content that’s available for the platform. We sampled four of the launch titles (out of 11) and came back with some brief impressions.
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| Kinect sports |
Kinect Sports: The albeit clichéd yet de rigueur ‘sports’ game, much like Wii Sports, lets you play volleyball, table tennis, boxing and the like agains human or computer opponents. There is something for everyone; from the tiring athletic events to laid back sessions of bowling, and this is the most likely game to be pulled out at the next party. Plus it does justice to the tech. I was sceptical that it could pull off games like table tennis without a physical controller, but I found them to be unexpectedly nuanced and very natural in their controls.
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| Kinect joy ride |
Kinect Joy Ride: A racing game which forces you to stand up and hold an imaginary steering wheel — if it sounds altogether too gimmicky, that’s because it is. I mean, the visuals are okay, the gameplay is interesting, and the first time you turn the car or perform bodily motions to initiate the ‘boost’ is pretty darn neat, but it soon gets tiring, quite literally, and you soon yearn to be able to put your arms down, sit down and drive a car with a real controller.
Dance Central: To me, Dance Central is the epitome of the Kinect platform, and one of the most innovative motion-enabled games around. Dance Central lets you learn how to dance choreographed dance steps, at your own pace, and it tracks your movements and tells you where you’re going wrong. There are a large number of tracks, and personally, this was the game I enjoyed the most of the launch titles. Plus it works up quite a sweat! A definite crowd puller this.
It’s clearly early days for Kinect. It has amazing potential if they get some more games right — the launch titles are nice-ish, but don’t nearly do Kinect enough justice, save for Dance Central. And it’s not for the hardcore gamer, at least not yet.
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| Kinectimals |
Kinectimals: You start off at Fur Junction, picking your own pretend animal to be your pet. I picked a tiger and called him — what else — Hobbes! You then teach them tricks like spinning around, jumping over stuff and the like. Naturally this involves you doing the same on the other side of the screen. Over time, you and your pet unlock new items and areas to explore, and while it’s not for me, I guess it’ll work for the kids. If they can deal with an incredible needy animal, who constantly wants to be giving them so-mething to do rather than just being around in their company.
SONY PLAYSTATION MOVE GAMES
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The Fight: If you think the visuals in the boxing game in Wii Sports or Kinect Sports lack the attitude and grit you need from a fighting game, you could try the unimaginatively named game called ‘The Fight’ on the PlayStation 3. The Fight is Move-enabled — it means that you can use one PS Move motion controller (ideally two) to fight a computer opponent, mano-e-mano.
You start by creating a fighter built to your spec (or your dream spec maybe), and then go down back-alleys and abandoned warehouses to find and take down your opponents in out-and-out brutal hand combat. Win, and you gain respect. Where this game fails to take off is some inexplicable game rules, like the fact that you should not move your feet or else you will ruin the calibration of the on-screen fighter with your actions. Accuracy is hit and miss as well, unusual for a PS Move game, and along with some odd design choices really takes the life out of what could have been a pretty decent game.
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The Sly Trilogy: Fans of the Sly Cooper series of PlayStation 2 games rejoice, as the Sly Trilogy brings together the past adventures of Sly the raccoon into the HD age, and the cartoony visual style is a tribute to the original series while looking updated for a 2010 spec game.
Along with a talented turtle and an unusually dimwitted hippo, Sly jumps, swings and dodges his way through various levels while looking for clues to complete levels and enhance his abilities. Merging into the excellent gameplay are several Move compatible mini games and 3D features brought in to add a touch of modernity to the classic collection. They don’t show off the potential of the Move platform, to be honest, and feel a tad forced. That said, the rest of the game is eminently playable, and stands as a testament to how good the old stuff still can be.