Back in March, I picked up a Kinect for my XBox and have played Kinect-based games on pretty much a daily basis since then. Overall, the Kinect’s body-tracking capabilities work much better than I ever assumed they would, but like the Wii, motion control so far just doesn’t lend itself well to anything beyond casual games that get tedious very quickly.
The biggest drawback to the Kinect as compared to something like the Wii is that there is a definite lag and there are times when even if you perfectly perform the physical action a game requires, there is still a small to large chance (that varies from game-to-game, so this is partly a game programming issue) that the system will not correctly identify it.
The lag is, oddly enough, most noticeable in the free casual game that comes with the Kinect, Kinect Adventures. Among the four activities in Kinect Adventures is a blockout/handball mashup called Rallyball. Balls come flying at you, and you’re supposed to kick, punch or body block them backwards. And, as my 8 year-old son found out much to his consternation, if you actually play the game that way you will lose because a high lag means by the time the XBox registers that your hand or foot is in position to make contact with the onscreen ball, the system has already registered a failure and the ball goes sailing past you. To succeed at the game, you have to play the Kinect almost as much as you’re playing the game onscreen. It is pretty easy to master, but takes a lot of fun out of the game.
There is also the occasional feeling of doing exactly what the system expects but having the Kinect/XBox/game inform you otherwise. Some of this is lag, but some of it appears to be due to the way in which the Kinect recognizes the shapes and forms our bodies make as we’re moving around in the play space.
Both of these problems cause occasional annoyances, but a bigger drawback is that it is hard to imagine playing very complex games with the Kinect. All of the games currently available for the Kinect are essentially casual games that are priced at the same price-point of non-casual games. Or, alternatively, if you like the Wii, you’ll like the Kinect. Personally, I can’t stand Wii games, but that’s just me.
So why does my Kinect still get plenty of daily use? There is one killer app that keeps bringing me back to the Kinect — exercise. The Kinect is an awesome system for exercising, and I say this as someone who absolutely despises real exercise. I spend about an hour and a half everyday with UbiSoft’s surprisingly good Fitness: Your Shape Evolved.
FYSE does have some issues with lag and with incorrectly identifying whether or not you’ve done a particular exercise, but it has a pretty varied set of workouts and does an excellent job of progressively opening up new content once you’ve mastered the current set of content. The instant feedback it gives is actually helpful, and the achievements and online tracking/rankings gets my Achievement Sense tingling every time.
That’s pretty much what I expected when I bought the Kinect, so spending $150 for an accessory that largely only gets used for exercise-related games isn’t an issue for me. My kids quickly got bored with the actual Kinect games, however, and went back to games that had more depth (and for an 8 year-old, the depth requirements of game aren’t very exacting), so I’d imagine there are a lot of Kinects sitting around gathering dust or being repurposed for some of the awesome PC hacks out there for it.