The Kinect was actually pretty sick, it had limited games though. It was also great for the hacker/maker space at the time, easy mass produced 3d scanners? Fuck yeah.
It was a doomed piece of hardware from the moment a Microsoft exec decided that console games should have registration keys. The only thing people talked about leading up to the Xbox One/PS4 launch was how evil Microsoft is for wanting to do that. Even after backtracking on it and apologizing, the narrative was set: the PlayStation is for gamers, the Xbox is for Microsoft’s C suite. The technology of the Kinect was never the subject of discussion.
Besides, even though people love to riff on it, Kinect Star Wars was actually great if you ignored everything but the Galactic Dance-Off mode. A very competent rhythm game where half of the songs are Star Wars filk? Sign me up!
I love when games themselves are sort of meh, but there’s that one thing in them that keeps you hooked for hours and hours because it’s done surprisingly well for some reason.
When I played FFX I basically stopped playing the story when I found blitzball. I’m not sure if I ever actually finished the game. It was amazing use of 3-D space that actually played really well, at least compared to what else was around at the time.
My kids were like 3 and 5 when Kinect was released and they bloody loved it. Also Dance Central was superb for drunken adults.
Plus if Alien Isolation wasn’t scary enough already, a Kinect would dial it up a notch.
Definitely limited appeal and the tracking wasn’t great on the 360 version, but for those first two scenarios (younger kids and late night dancing) it was a superb party game.
“If you make noise in real life, then the alien will hear you in game.”. As if A:I needed to be any more terrifying than it is.
Still - it’s a very expensive bit of hardware to implement the microphone feature that eg. the Famicom had, and the ‘tracking’ functionality only benefits a couple of games. Bizarre decision to make it mandatory as part of the console.
What are you talking about? It wasn’t mandatory for any console. They packaged it in with some, so you’d get it in the same box, but you never had to plug it in.
And all the voice functionality worked with headsets as well. Definitely watched old roommates do Skyrim shouts that way for around 10 minutes until the novelty wore off.
The Kinect was actually pretty sick, it had limited games though. It was also great for the hacker/maker space at the time, easy mass produced 3d scanners? Fuck yeah.
It was a doomed piece of hardware from the moment a Microsoft exec decided that console games should have registration keys. The only thing people talked about leading up to the Xbox One/PS4 launch was how evil Microsoft is for wanting to do that. Even after backtracking on it and apologizing, the narrative was set: the PlayStation is for gamers, the Xbox is for Microsoft’s C suite. The technology of the Kinect was never the subject of discussion.
Besides, even though people love to riff on it, Kinect Star Wars was actually great if you ignored everything but the Galactic Dance-Off mode. A very competent rhythm game where half of the songs are Star Wars filk? Sign me up!
I love when games themselves are sort of meh, but there’s that one thing in them that keeps you hooked for hours and hours because it’s done surprisingly well for some reason.
When I played FFX I basically stopped playing the story when I found blitzball. I’m not sure if I ever actually finished the game. It was amazing use of 3-D space that actually played really well, at least compared to what else was around at the time.
My kids were like 3 and 5 when Kinect was released and they bloody loved it. Also Dance Central was superb for drunken adults.
Plus if Alien Isolation wasn’t scary enough already, a Kinect would dial it up a notch.
Definitely limited appeal and the tracking wasn’t great on the 360 version, but for those first two scenarios (younger kids and late night dancing) it was a superb party game.
“If you make noise in real life, then the alien will hear you in game.”. As if A:I needed to be any more terrifying than it is.
Still - it’s a very expensive bit of hardware to implement the microphone feature that eg. the Famicom had, and the ‘tracking’ functionality only benefits a couple of games. Bizarre decision to make it mandatory as part of the console.
What are you talking about? It wasn’t mandatory for any console. They packaged it in with some, so you’d get it in the same box, but you never had to plug it in.
And all the voice functionality worked with headsets as well. Definitely watched old roommates do Skyrim shouts that way for around 10 minutes until the novelty wore off.
Are you me?
I loved tinkering with the camera and I also had just a few games.
Played the shit out of Fruit Ninja, though.