XBox and Kinect

One of the big releases this year was XBox's Kinect system. At first, my husband and I weren't overly interested in the Kinect. It looked pretty cool, but just not enough to justify the price for us. But, this Christmas, our 7-yr-old went over our heads to the big man in red himself, and we found a shiny new XBox with Kinect under our tree.

Overall, I've found to be an impressive system. The time delay between reading your actions and executing them on the screen is no more than any other controller (which is actually rather impressive when you consider how many calculations it has to do to translate full-body movement). The voice commands work fairly well, as long as you speak clearly. The infra-red sensors even recognize you when you're signed in, so if someone has to cut in front of you while you're playing, it doesn't read their movements as input.

However, it is not without its drawbacks. Our playing space is 6.5 feet deep, and the sensor sits about 5.5 feet above the floor. Usually, this is suitable for a lot of gameplay. But when doing movements that lift over my head, or involve laying on the floor (usually during working out), the angle doesn't quite pick it up correctly, and the floor-based movements especially get largely cut off.

Calibrating the sensor is fairly easy and intuitive. Initially, you just stand with a little card (that comes with Kinect) and adjust it to fit into a certain space, then the system scans it. Fine-tuning for a play session just simply requires standing still in the center of your play space while it reads your body and adjusts accordingly.

However, I have yet to find any way to fine-tune it manually where you can adjust the viewing angle on your own. This would have been a huge improvement, especially if it could be done on the fly during gameplay without having to quit out of your current game session. Adding this alone would make problems with movements that extend upwards, or require laying on the floor, almost completely go away.

The Kinect holds a lot more potential than I really granted it when I heard about it. Workout games (which I'll be talking about in more detail later this month), dance games, and the like are all a lot more fun with the Kinect. The ability to do engage in games without having to figure out the best way to hold a controller makes it a lot more fun, and a lot easier to just dive into the action.

I haven't messed around with it a whole lot outside of my workout game, but I think as time goes on, Kinect is just going to get better and better.