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XBox Kinect: 8 Million Sold and Growing!
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Anyhow, I'm wary of over-working my 360 (it's my third one). If I'm using a non-Kinect game, will it shut down the Kinect automatically? Or should I just manually unplug the Kinect during those times I'd like to game without it? Sorry if that's a stupid question, but the thing stays lit up when I'm in a non-Kinect game.
I have someone on my friends list I saw doing Your Shape and Active and then stopping, I almost want to send a message "dude! I'm watching you!" just keeping each other honest
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I have tried 2 different ones, and it has given me a message similar to "this doesn't conform to the standards we require so it might not work". Do I need to buy some kind of premium thumb drive or something? I bought a brand new 4GB one to trasfer saves and profiles between my two boxes, but I feel like I'm doing something wrong.
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Half-assed Netflix support. And that's about it.
Child of Eden is looking really, really interesting, but of course you don't need a Kinect to play it.
on the netflix, i'm really glad they added in voice support but the 'netflix hub' is stupid and whoever thought of this solution should be fired. why not just let me use my queue, it's not even that the interface is that bad (could easily be much much better though), i just want my videos and not some suggested random crap
I keep mixing it in with Dance Central because yea it's rough if you try the whole session right off the bat.
It really is mind-boggling that the tech is really exciting the research community, but game publishers are having a hard time doing much with it.
Or maybe it's not all that mind-boggling, considering how the majority of third-parties have half-assed the Wii controls.
edit: from the way it's being applied to other things through hacks, it's clear the technology works, it just almost needs people to invent new games for it. If they're trying to shoehorn Kinect controls into a standard FPS or something, it's just going to fail hard. It'll need some creative thinking to come up with something different, but I'm excited for it.
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Actually, the same thing happened with the Wii. Nintendo didn't announce the motion controls until E3 a few months before launch, and before that most devs were "meh" on the idea. But when they finally got excited about it... they farted out lazy minigames for the most part.
The problems with innovative, disruptive new technologies are that most publishers would rather take the path of least resistance, i.e. take existing game design, tweak it a wee bit, and call it a day.
It would be sweet to have "Xbox launch Castle Crashers" or "Xbox play Pinball" available at anytime.
Yeah, and it bothers me that that will likely be where the majority of Kinect games go. But I figure that, while the Wii was new and everyone felt they could get away with just smearing some waggle onto their ports and calling it a day, someone will eventually realise that this isn't going away and get off their arse to design a game for motion controls. That, or someone will stumble over a shock hit and everyone else will actively clamour to get in on the action.
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If you go the other way around and have a control system you want to add into a game, the focus is completely different as you're going from 'what do I want the player to do, and how do I make a game out of that'.
That said, I'm surprised we've not seen some sort of squad based FPS whichuses normal Xbox controls for you but uses the Kinect for the squad commands rather than loading up buttons and dials with them. Seems the most natural evolution to a making use of them in a 'normal' game - after all, you do need to let go of your gun to signal people. If you wanted something other than modern warfare to highlight your twist, add some terminator or aliens style setting where humans have to work as a team in order to defeat much larger and better equipped enemies (and thus need to flank and co-ordinate attacks that the normal AI on it's own would struggle to do without guidance).
http://www.rare.co.uk/blog/?p=3977#blog
Sounds completely dumb so I'll be doing it for sure!
http://www.rare.co.uk/news/break-a-sweat-with-kinect-sports-calorie-challenge#mainContentBody
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR9Svq_T_5E
Kinect Sports is awesome and the calorie counter in Your Shape has me totally hooked so hopefuly this wil be a decently compelling addition.
Will be interesting to see how 250 'Kinect Sports calories' feels on your body compared to 250 'Your Shape calories'.
Also this picture makes me chuckle;
I got a Kinect sensor for Christmas this year and I've only just really gotten around to playing with it. By re-arranging my fairly ample living room I've been able to play Kinectadventures, which I've had some fun with, but I've just tried to use it with netflix and in a practical environment (i.e without moving EVERYTHING out of the way) to control media and it flat out can't see me. Stupidly I bought a slightly skin coloured sofa.
Is there anything I can do to get this to work WITHOUT having to re-arrange my entire living room if I want to embrace controller-less movie watching?
How has this thing sold so much?!?
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Or just chuck a blanket over it when you want to play Kinect?
What games did you pick up?
I've come from using XBMC and VoxCommando which (whilst definitely not perfect and resulted in a fair few false voice recognitions whilst watching something) let you search for films and tv shows via voice. Netflix seems to be limited to (essentially) up, down, next page, previous page when browsing for films.
It's daft fun but I really can't see how Microsoft pumped so much money in to it, thus far it hasn't done anything that I couldn't have seen the PS Eye do (not to dredge up an old argument) and it's triple the size. Are there any decent games scheduled to use it coming out?
The tech videos on youtube, however, are very impressive and show what could really be done.
PSN: SirGrinchX
Xbox Live: SirGrinch X
I'm a big Your Shape fan.
Also Child of Eden and Gunstringer are a blast.
But Fruit Ninja is the best Kinect game by far IMHO.
As far as on the horizon? Allegedly we're still getting Steel Battalion and that Star Wars mini-game fest is coming out; let's hope they used the delay to clean out all the lag and un-fun.
Reminds me, I need to get Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, I loved the demo with the missus.
Kinect Labs has some interesting content, some of it sucks and is just broken, but some content is both free and amusing enough for a few minutes with a bunch of Achievements to boot.
The Disney game got good reviews, and PowerUp Heroes is by all accounts decent, but short, not fired it up yet - you can buy it for about £13 on Play etc. I've heard good things (especially co-op) about Leedmees but not played it myself, missed the sale the other week.
I really enjoyed Kinectimals but that is certainly gaming marmite.
Also some XBLA games like Haunt on the horizon, think that is coming this week on XBLA.
I bought one of those fucking zoom lenses and that was a bloody waste of money, sure it gets you in frame but it adds like 50% interference in the center and 100% interference around the edges.
Should I knock down the wall and sit my couch in the garage or something? I also maintain my game room is bigger than the average household's game room and so I wonder how the hell this thing sold as well as it did? Do people actually have the 8 to 10 feet you're supposed to have, or are they just not noticing the damn thing not registering stuff well?
setting up the kinect is probably the hardest part. can i ask, do you have it infront of your TV or on top? the higher off the ground it is i feel, the easier i can get your whole body in frame. i try to have it chest level for best results. also make sure the room is well lit and, use the kinect tuner/calibration card.
I was thinking of mounting it above my TV sort of pointing downward, would you recommend that?
also make sure the lenses is mounted right, i had mine off-center for a week and thought it was crap, but then found i had put it on wrong (the lenses aren't supposed to stick out, but be flush to the rest of the zoom). if it doesn't work you might try just removing the lenses.
In my old flat (recently bought a house) I'd put up a shelf above the TV with the Kinect pointing downward, that worked really well.
I only have 6 foot from the edge of the TV unit to my sofa, so having it mounted above the TV gives me an extra foot(ish).
Even so, most games I need to shove the sofa out the way and play using that space too.
Not ideal, I could set up the new front room differently (it's narrower than my old place but much longer, 10ft by 23ft!) but decent placement of furniture is more important than Kinect... I had a kinda 'diagonal' set up across the front room in my old flat.
Might look into that zoom thing.
It's really kind of sad there are no good games out since launch but I'll echo fragglefart in saying that Fruit Ninja is about the best game there is now. Also if you are going to buy that you might as well just go the eBay route and get a Fruit Ninja/Gunstringer combo card for 15-20 bucks instead of 40+ retail. I think I paid 15 bucks on Friday for one from a guy and he emailed me the codes within 10 minutes of me paying him.
Does the Zoom really work? I keep seeing mixed reviews and that it doesn't perform well with certain titles.
I wish regular games would just have voice integration as a gameplay or even navigation element, every Kinect game now seems like it's an "all or nothing" affair and that blows.
The voice controls works much, much better now - for my 7 year old too. A few nights ago we were catching up on Doctor Who episodes and it was time to head up to dinner. I told him it was time to quit and said "Xbox" preparing to stop the show and quit...he immediately jumped in with "Next episode" and it started the next one without missing a beat.
I still wish there was a simple play command for all games in your library like "XBox play Castle Crashers" - that would be great. We've found we can't bing Raskulls successfully too.
Of course you can also use your quickplay list, so 'Xbox Quickplay Iron Brigade' works just fine, depending on what you have been playing recently.