Tancap Blog » Kinect

Happy Holidays

Tim — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 04:06:10 +0000

Happy Holidays Everyone!

I finally got around to publishing a few new reviews including:

Microsoft Kinect First Thoughts

Tim — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 02:23:34 +0000

I’ve had a chance to play with the Kinect for a little over a week now. Overall I’m actually fairly impressed. While not quite as accurate as PlayStation’s Move, movement is overall tracked quite well for most of the titles I tried. Even though the cost of entry is higher than the Move, when you figure in the cost of all the controllers necessary for two players it is actually quite competitive. While there were some bad initial titles released, overall I feel the initial lineup for the Kinect is substantially better. Some people have complained that many Kinect games are physically strenuous and can’t be played for long periods of times. I would argue that those people are (with a couple of exceptions) missing the point. Kinect is not about providing an better interface for playing hours of Halo. For those type of FPS games, a controller (or better yet a mouse and keyboard) will always be a better choice. Kinect is about providing a pickup and play experience, removing the intimidation factor that comes from dealing with traditional multiple XBox gamepad. In this it is clearly successful, perhaps even more so than even the Wii. What remains to be seen is how well third party developers (many of which have struggled with the Wii), will be able to utilize it.

Microsoft at E3

Tim — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 01:00:20 +0000

Today Microsoft was center stage at E3. Microsoft announced a new slim version of the XBox 360 elite. The official product name for Natal will be Kinect. A whole slew of games using Kinect were featured including Dance Central, Kinectimals, Kinect Sports, Kinect Joy Ride, Kinect Adventures, Kinect: Star Wars, Your Shape Fitness Evolved, Deca Sports Freedom, Zumba Fitness and EA Sports Active 2. There will be an ESPN 3 app for the 360 as well as video chat (VideoKinect), and Kinect integration for Zune. Other games featured included Halo: Reach, Call of Duty Black Ops, Fable III, Kingdoms, Madden NFL 11, and Rock Band 3. If you own a 360 you can get more details by checking out “XBOX @ E3″ in the Spotlight section. You can see some of the Kinect games in action at the xbox.com website.