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Xbox 360 Kinect Review Roundup
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by Jordan Yerman | November 4, 2010 at 09:53 am
2075 views | 1 Recommendation | 3 comments
Xbox 360 Kinect Reviews Are In
The Xbox 360 Kinect was officially launched at midnight on November 3. Touted as the "Wii killer", Kinect uses motion sensors to trac players' natural gestures.
CNET has some reviews of some early Kinect game titles, but let's look at reviews of the Kinect peripheral itself.
Luke Westaway at CNET UK gives the Kinect 4 out of 5 stars. He said that the Kinect was "hugely entertaining", but not for hardcore gamers, and that the motion sensor is fairly rudimentary at this point.
He points out how quickly you will lose your dignity as you flail about, and that is a plus.
Kinect is broadly capable of figuring out where you are and what you're doing, but only broadly -- don't expect to make a virtual cat's cradle or do anything else particularly fiddly with this system
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Randy Nelson at Joystiq had difficulty with the facial recognition, which is key to the Kinect experience.
As it turned out, removing my glasses was the fix. I performed the Kinect ID setup again and sped through it in a flash. The console recognized me. All was well. Except for the fact that I need my glasses to see, and didn't really care to take them off every time I wanted to be recognized.
Unless there's some sort of Kinect/Lasik package available, Microsoft will have to sort that bug out fairly quickly.
This experience is genuinely new. If motion games until now were like boxing, Kinect is like kickboxing. You can use your freaking legs! Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is like Wii Fit if Wii Fit actually knew if you were keeping your back straight or arms held out, instead of cheating by sitting on the couch.
Jason Chen at Gizmodo sees Kinect as the future of gaming (and gesture-based computing), provided it integrates with titles other than party games. However, he points out that the play area, while deep, is too narrow. Player 2 kept getting shoved out of the camera's field of detection. That, along with the unclear direction of title development, kept Chen from recommending it outright.
Stephen Totilo at Kotaku was not completely sold, either. He said that the Kinect is the sort of device, at least for now, that you wait for your friends to buy.
Microsoft says this is essentially a new console, that Kinect is a new platform. True? Maybe, but it's at least right to say that Kinect is launching the way a new console does: with raw potential and some half-baked execution. At launch you can discover wonderful details, like the fact that Dance Central and Kinect Joy Ride pause when you step away from your TV. But you can also find frustration at games that don't share the same methods for skipping cut-scenes or advancing through menus.
The Kinect requires about nine feet of space between the screen and the back area of play: keep that in mind if you have heavy or sharp living room furniture, or if you live in a narrow apartment. If you don't have a lot of space, the peripheral won't work properly.
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Jordan Yerman
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
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Recommendations (1)
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (3)
at 18:39 on November 4th, 2010
Nice article! I'm quite impressed on how innovative the gaming technology is.
at 18:41 on November 4th, 2010
I really love xbox!
at 00:54 on December 10th, 2010
I like xbox!
360 controller
kinect
xbox 360 wireless receiver