Yeah, call me a sellout, call me a hypocrite, but for the sake of being (relatively) unbiased I decided to trade in a bunch of the games I've gotten through recently and finally bite the bullet by buying a Kinect.
Aaaaaanyways, that aside, I spent about 45 minutes getting ready to play the Kinect. Why? Because of the tremendous amount of space it requires to play. I can understand why it needs 8 feet of space, but it really doesn't work well even in what Kinect considers to be it's "Good Range" (about 5-6ft.). My problem is that I'm tall. Like 6'5 tall. I kind of had to jimmy-rig it with my existing systems so that it could pick up my full body within the 6 ft of space. You definitely will benefit with even one player by having a full living room to play it in.
As for the setup, other than the whole "Shifting 80% of my room around" it went fairly smoothly. It did a lot of tests, and revealed it's motor function--which sometimes is a bit creepy, because the camera will size up the room by looking down, then looking up, then finally centering itself.
But how does it work? That's the question on everyone's mind.
Having played Wii, having played Move, and having played Kinect (under the current space restriction), I still have to say that the Move works the best. The Kinect wasn't picking up a lot of my foot movements, and it overall feels a little laggy (on the gameplay side of things). Sometimes it doesn't pick up your gestures right, or you get a little bit of delay, which is odd when it's something like browsing the dashboard. Also, I don't like how I have to access a special menu to use all of the Kinect features. What happened to being able to scroll through the dashboard with your hands? As of time of writing this, I was only able to use the voice feature of the Kinect to access the Kinect menu (as the tutorial seems to prompt you as the only way to access it).
On the gameplay side? With Kinect Adventures, although I didn't play it too much, it still felt a little laggy. This is the game where I was unable to get it to pick up my leg movements while playing the game where you bounce your ball against a wall. Mainly this resulted in standing in the same place, just waving my arms to bounce the balls. I still haven't tried the other games.
On to Dance Central.
This is the game which is lauded for it's status of "Killer App" of the Kinect. I spent the majority of my time tonight (about 5 minutes to be honest) of playing it. I'll admit, I felt a little gay putting the game in and starting up with trying to dance to Lady Gaga's Poker Face (one of the easiest songs). While learning the dance moves I learned that the game actually requires the sound from you clapping as part of the dance move, and that it wouldn't accept a soft clap. The microphone actually has to pick up the clap. The fact that I was playing it in a household of sleeping people at about midnight was what finally made me quit it. More on it tomorrow, and there should be a video review sometime soon.
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