Kinect “Body-On” Impressions

So I’m sitting in an air-conditioned conference room in Hanover square with a bunch of other people I’ve never met and I’m mentally preparing myself to look like a complete arsehat in front of all of them.

I have an hour long PowerPoint presentation to sit through before that though, presented by a guy dealing off buzz words such as “off the couch gaming” and “intensive gameplay” like there is no tomorrow. This of course isn’t his fault, it’s just classic Microsoft talk. We get shown Microsoft backed titles like Kinectimals and Kinect Adventures, along with 3rd party titles like EA Sports Active 2.0 and Ubisoft’s Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, none of which are filling me with any confidence in Kinect. The only Kinect game I care about, Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s (of Rez and Space Channel 5 fame) Child of Eden is not present and we’re told we’re not allowed to talk about that. All right, so my opinion of Kinect is well know to anyone that knows me…. I hate it. However the next 2 hours will change that….a little.

After a quick break that involves cigarettes, coffee and bad mouthing Kinect,‏ we finally get a look at the device itself. We get shown a dev kit version of Kinect that seems very buggy indeed, with it having trouble distinguishing between people who aren’t playing the games and those who are. It also somehow reads a massive flight case as a person and proceeds to send an unnamed avatar to go into a flailing crazy fit on screen. Not a good start.

The first game I get my hands….body on is Kinect Sports, a sports party game that includes track and field, football,table tennis, boxing and bowling….hang on this sounds familiar. Okay, so it does sounds a little too similar to another launch title party game but that cant really be helped I guess and I have to admit Track and Field was a lot of fun and does leave you out of breath, making you feel like you did just run the hurdles.

The next title I got to play was the weakest of the day, Dance Central. A dance game from MTV and Harmonix, we get a choice of 8 really bad songs to “dance” really badly at by mirroring the on-screen dancer, which lets you know if your failing by their limbs glowing red, which my dancer seemed to do a lot (by the way I get 2 out of 5 stars on easy, just confirming my masculinity). I really wasn’t impressed by Dance Central and it seemed none of my fellow attendees were impressed either, already eyeing up our next game, Kinect Adventures.

Kinect Adventures will be packaged with Kinect this coming November, so this is the title most people will be playing in 2 months’ time. Kinect Adventures again seemed to have problems recognizing myself and another attendee right away, but once it was finally sorted a very competent party game was unveiled that got everyone shouting and having fun.

The games were short, sweet and didn’t outstay their welcome and actually had people coming back to join in. Kinect Adventures is the title Microsoft needed to get right, as it might well be the only game families will be playing this Christmas and they need to show that Kinect isn’t just another Wii phenomenon cash-in. If they get it wrong it could single handedly kill Kinect.

While I did have fun with Kinect, I’m still not a 100% convinced by it. It seems too buggy, too slow to respond and has none of the accuracy that Microsoft have been shouting about since E3 2009. It has the same thing that plagues the Wii. Loss of cursor/pointer and the frustration that comes along with it and being told “it’s just sensitive” isn’t a good excuse. “It doesn’t quite work how we’d like” is a better one. I’m hoping the final product will have all of these little niggles ironed out and will prove to be the “Gaming revolution” that Microsoft wants/needs it to be.

I’m now on the fence about Kinect until I see bugs sorted out and some more long lasting titles, like Child of Eden (seriously, why would you not show it?). Us hardcore gamers need reassuring that Kinect is for “everyone” and Mizuguchi’s title could have been the one to do just that.