May 28, 2011

So, you have seen Xbox Kinect commercials in TV and some of your friends have it. Question is: is it time to buy it or should you wait till Nintendo Wii 3 (coming out in 2012) and till Sony Playstation  have it?

First of all: Japanese are killing whales, so don’t buy any Japanese console like Playstation or Wii. Not to mention security breach in Sony Playstation network where credit card numbers of users have been stolen by hackers, not just user data.

Hardware is hardware but let’s take a look at software.

The basic question is: is that Kinect thingy good enough for you?

Well, if you expect that Kinect sensor will track movement of your fingers, then forget it: it can track only your body, it is not yet that precise to scan fingers.

Although for body scanning Kinect technology is very good the problem is elsewhere:

* there are not enough Kinect-specific games that would be appealing for users

* existing mega-hits like Halo and Star Wars still don’t support Kinect in gameplay so hard core gamers can’t use Kinect at all

If we take a look at currently available Kinect-compatible Xbox games:

… then we can see only 14 games:

Harry Potter,
Kinect Adventures
Dance Central
Kinect Sports
Kinect Joy Ride
Kinectimals
Your Shape Fitness Evolved
Sonic Free Raiders
Fighters Uncaged
Motion Sports
Dance Evolution
EA Sports Active 2
Zumba Fitness
Deca Sports Freedom

… and many games announced for early 2011 for example, have not been released. When I have heard that UFC will not be released in April 2011 as planned but is delayed several months, I felt like challenging current heavy weight boxing champion (the Ukrainian Klitschko) to fist fight…

There is for example only one, rather mediocre, full-body fighting game:

… but it has unreliable controls and very boring way to score points: even if you defeated all enemies/adversaries you still are not going to next round.

All other “sports” games for Kinect have very primitive or very limited fighting “mini-games” or features.

Most Kinect games are either about dancing or about aerobic workouts with rather lame controls in most cases.

So the answer to the question “is it time to buy Kinect yet” is simple: no. While Kinect sensor is very good in sensing, and it would be usable for Skype video calling (Microsoft has purchased Skype but still there is no Skype client for Xbox), the quality and variety of Kinect games simply is not big enough yet.

How long should you wait? My advice is: till Xmas shopping period around December 2011: then Star Wars Kinect and many other games should be ready…

Share This

---

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•