Issue Seven - Conversations on Technology, Business and Society

selves crunching into the turf over and over, either
from performing the wrong moves, or just
doing them too late. The delay of the Kinect
system makes itself most obvious when jumping,
which feels like it happens on screen a full
second after you’ve done it in real life. Your feet
are already planted firmly back on the carpet by
the time it registers.
Even if we had a little more luck with it, we
can’t see this type of gameplay keeping anyone
– even a casual gamer lured in by the Kinect
– occupied for very long. Besides a few extra
points for exceptionally clean maneuvers, its
sheer monotony.
Skiing
Unlike football, Ubisoft’s skiing game actually
lets you steer. The motion itself is mostly in the
shoulders, while crouching controls speed (lower
is faster) and clawing away at virtual ski poles
lets you push off from a standstill.
Out of the gate, steering feels awkward.
Although heeding the game’s instructions not
to oversteer allows us not to run off the track
immediately, it the character’s on-screen mo-
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tions steel feel choppy and disconnected from
our own. He almost seems to move in notches.
Hardly the graceful carving motion you imagine
with skiing.
The pacekeeping avatar that picks all the
perfect lines passed us in an instant and disappeared
over the next hill. Even if you can manage
to stay between the gates, picking those
same razor-thin lines using your shoulders to
steer feels like using a butterknife to perform
surgery.
Root Beer Tapper, Quarterback Challenge
and more
Other titles followed a similar pattern. Warner
Bros.’ Game Party offered the same dismal sense
of control with graphics and kiddie themes
more suited for the Wii. The only trolls we hit
in the Whack a Troll game were by accident,
we sloshed soda everywhere and made quite a
few digital customers angry in Root Beer Tapper,
and Quarterback Challenge proved to be
nearly impossible.
Lots of Sizzle, Where’s the Steak?
One year ago, the sloppy and generally imprecise
experiences we had with Kinect could have
been passed off as pre-alpha buginess. But this
is the state of Kinect in 2010, just months away
from launch. With a full extra year of development
under its belt, we’re not impressed with
what we’ve seen.
The Kinect is not easy to use, it’s not accurate,
and it’s not fun. The only worse waste of
$150 we can imagine spending on the Kinect
at this point is the ensuing trickle of dollars that
would go into buying the present selection of
godawful titles for it.
If there’s any potential for Kinect, it probably
lies in its use as a tool for controlling menus.
The few opportunities we had to interact with
it on this level – rather than in games – it actually
offered enough precision to not only work,
but work well. If it can maintain that feel from a
couch, reaching for the remote could become a
thing of the past. www.digitaltrends.com
SEPTEMEBER - OCTOBER 2010 | PC TECH
GAMING
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