xbox Kinect review

[Stalker]

It’s great. Though It’ s great as pretty much only a party game. I can see occasionally playing it just to play it, but really, it’s going to be a party thing or kids game. It completely and utterly negates the need for a Wii. I played it for about 8 hours at a friends house and here’s what we did and what I noticed.

Games played: Sports, Dance Central
What I noticed:
You need a TON of room. Basically you need to be able to jump as high as you can, with your arms straight up and be able to spin around with your arms all the way out to the side. You also seem to need a decent amount of space between you and the TV. Too close and it can’t read you. Too far away and it tells you to move forward. When we played, I was about 10 to 15 feet away at all time. I didn’t check to see how close you could get before it couldn’t read you, but guessing from the setup procedure I’d say you need to be at least 5 feet away from the TV in order to play games.

The ad’s are greatly misleading. Many things you see in the announcement etc just aren’t in the system yet. For instance. If I walk up to the Xbox, it will see me, but till I wave my hand at it for a few seconds, it doesn’t attempt to log me in. This obviously keeps the game from putting people in and out of games at random. So it’s a good thing, but a little misleading. When it comes to playing games, it’s also mislead. You can’t walk up and even wave your hand and join the game. You join the game when you’re told to join the game, or you pause it and add a player. For instance. Dance central makes you think people can just jump in and dance with you. Not true. You can only have someone join in the game with you when it says “player two get ready to dance”. That only happens at certain points in the dance routine. It’s implied that you can control your desktop with your hand. While that’s partially true it’s not. You can control your KINECT dashboard with your hand. There’s quite a difference in the dashboards and what you can and cannot do with the Kintect one.

It’s a little glitchy which is to be expected in a v.1 software. For instance, when a small child plays, it takes it quite a bit of work to get it to pick up an adult again. It also has a tendency to pick up the wrong person if you’re logging in and someone walks in front of the camera at the same time.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get one yet or not. It’s fun when you have a group to play it with, but really outside of that it’s only going to be entertaining to kids.

[YLWFVR]

Nice Writeup. Yes I intend to purchase it soley for my wife/daughter and for when people come over. Amazon has a sale going on right now of 1 buy kinect, get 1 50% off. not bad consdering avg price right now is 45 bucks per game.

[cjmatt]

have u done the teleconference yet? I mainly wanted it just for that, so I could hang out and shoot the shit with friends in other cities

[Stalker]

it's ok. The video is pretty grainy, but for just shooting the shit it's ok. Whoever you video conference with doesn't have to have Kinect. As long as they have a Windows Live Messenger account and a webcam you can chat with them as well.