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walbournWe got our Kinect today. Well, honestly, we've had the Alpha and then Beta hardware for months, but we actually got four real game titles today--over the summer we mostly played "Cursor Chase" which is about as much fun as you'd think. Kinectimals is sickeningly cute, and Rhys will love it. I found it amusing that they are using Direct3D Shader Model 3.0 generation hardware mostly to do grass, fur, and slobber. Joy Ride is fun, and reminded me a bit of the old classic Crazy Taxi. Kinect Sports is pretty good so far. The bowling is fun, the table-tennis a little awkward, and the volleyball... well, a 6' 2" player attempting a jump & slam with 7 foot popcorn ceilings did not work out. I guess we'll have to listen to my brother's "Just vault the #*@!ing ceilings" comment after all :> I haven't tried Kinect Adventures yet, mostly due to the implied injuries sustained during Kinect Sports.
All-in-all, the game developers have managed to squeeze a lot of fun out of severely over-hyped technology despite some huge processing constraints put on them by the fact that Kinect is being added to a 4 year old console. It is much improved from the beta testing experiences, and the titles do a great job hiding most of the technical quibbles. I personally find using the dash with the Kinect hand gestures pretty frustrating, but the launch games are solid enough, easy to use, and actually a lot more physical exercise than sitting on the couch. We've not really gotten into any situation where we've used the speech recognition from the array-microphone yet, but I hear it is pretty good at least for non-accented English.
All-in-all, the game developers have managed to squeeze a lot of fun out of severely over-hyped technology despite some huge processing constraints put on them by the fact that Kinect is being added to a 4 year old console. It is much improved from the beta testing experiences, and the titles do a great job hiding most of the technical quibbles. I personally find using the dash with the Kinect hand gestures pretty frustrating, but the launch games are solid enough, easy to use, and actually a lot more physical exercise than sitting on the couch. We've not really gotten into any situation where we've used the speech recognition from the array-microphone yet, but I hear it is pretty good at least for non-accented English.
