Do you wanna Kinect?

Project Natal was criticised for being a lot of smoke and mirrors, and at E3 2010 it was up to Microsoft to prove the disbelievers wrong. They made a terrible job at it at first, but Kinect was as awful as the Natal Experience and Cirque du Soleil had me thinking.

It was Sunday night, a couple of days before the expo opened, and Microsoft had invited developers, press, and partners to attend the Natal Experience. An exhaustingly long, poncho clad, pretentious affair orchestrated by the talented Cirque du Soleil. Seemingly more aimed towards the potential MTV audience the next day than anyone in attendance, this event was a giant waste of time for for the hundreds of games journalists in attendance. A simple press release containing only the word Kinect would have done the trick better. Microsoft managed to piss off almost everyone who were meant to communicate why Kinect would be of interest to core gamers (as people who don't take much enjoyment out of aimlessly waving their arms are called).

But I had to rid my mind of all those negative thoughts as I headed to the Microsoft press conference the next day. Surely they had more to show us than just rip offs of Nintendo products with the word Kinect in front of the titles?

And there were some exceptions. Mostly thanks to third parties as it turned out. Ubisoft had Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, a piece of training software that takes full advantage of the Kinect features, Harmonix's Dance Central, that aims to be the Rock Band and dance titles, and Q Entertainment's spiritual successor to Rez - Child of Eden, that simply looked awesome. It's rather stunning that while third parties have come up with these promising titles Microsoft's Turn 10 have spent time on letting people use the Kinect camera to take a closer look at the car models in Forza. I'm sure there is more to "Forza Kinect", but it was painful to see how little Microsoft had to offer themselves in terms of Kinect software apart from the obvious Wii-esque launch line up.

It spoke volumes that one of the things Microsoft decided to push was the unnamed Star Wars title Lucasarts is developing for Kinect. Personally I would much prefer to play that sort of game with Playstation Move where there is a sense of weight and feedback as you swing your lightsabre. It shows that there are some limits to the wonders of controller free gaming, and that nothing isn't always better than something. Then again using your hands to perform a "force push" is rather nice.

But, even if they are rip offs of concept we have seen before, they might be fun, right? I mean how can you go wrong with a sports compilation, kart racing and cute animals? I headed for the Microsoft booth to try them out for myself.

The first thing I learnt about Kinect is how sensitive it is. I really don't see how most of these games will work in a living room full of people. It frequently picked up people standing next to the walls in the booth and even though it picked up stuff it shouldn't it still lost track of me when I a feet or so too close to the camera while bowling. There was also the issue of lag, and at times it did a really poor job of mimicking my movements. For instance you could record a "living statue" in the Kinect Adventures demo, and as I did a "spin-o-rama" jump, my avatar would just simply jump up and down. When I tried to teach my pet panther (alright, having a pet panther is pretty cool I give them that) to play dead, I must have dropped down too quickly cause the panther thought I had left. It made a sad panther face.

These are of course little things that can be tweaked and tuned for release and hopefully the technological foundation is solid enough for these glitches to be phased out. But to be honest I didn't enjoy the first party titles much at all. Kinectanimals, while cute, seemed a bit too much like chain of tasks than a game where you could freely interact with virtual animals. Kinect Sports had its moments, running in place works well and bowling was okay, but ultimately I felt like I had been there and done that. I have high hopes for the boxing part of Kinect Sports as bobbing and weaving as well as punching could make for a much better experience than anything we have seen on Wii. Kinect Adventures just didn't do it at all for me and Kinect Joy Ride came across as a distinctly average racing experience.

At this point I don't see anything that would warrant a $150 dollar purchase (or even $100), unless you're an absolute Rez worshipper (which, I happen to be by the way). I'm sure there will be more stuff revealed as we close in on the November release date, but Microsoft have a lot of convincing to do before I would recommend Kinect to any of you.