Microsoft Kinect: The AnandTech Review

Kinect Adventures

The title that ships with Kinect really has to be awesome, and luckily Kinect Adventures is pretty much exactly what I’d expect it to be. It’s sort of a bundle of simple games that lend themselves to full body control, and the whole collection is packaged up almost like a tour of various minigames. 

Most of the minigames have already been shown off, but there are a bunch more to talk about. Blocking and bouncing kickballs in a virtual tunnel of sorts, an obstacle course with full body movements, water rafting, and another which involves plugging leaks in a virtual aquarium. They’re bundled together either in an adventure mode or through free play, and can have single player or two-player support.

If Kinect Adventures is analogous to Wii Sports, (in that it ships with the platform and establishes the baseline level of expectations for immersion), then the bar is set pretty high. Adventures leverages the depth sensor and full body tracking quite well, and all of the minigames require a lot of movement. 

Adventures also leverages the color camera and takes pictures of you while you’re playing. Most of the time the photo events are marked with a camera coming up on screen and are carefully placed to coincide with some jump or large movement, and the results are generally pretty hilarious. Again here the color camera seems a bit noisier and lower resolution than what I’d consider ideal, and if you’re playing in low light you can turn into a smear if Kinect tries to take a photo of you while jumping. Provide lots of ambient light, however, and the results are pretty good. I’m a bit puzzled by why they seem to be smashed into the wrong aspect ratio when played back at the end of the game (sure, they’re supposed to look like Polaroid photos, but aspect-incorrect scaling is annoying), but the photos themselves are fine. You can then upload these to kinectshare.com and from there download directly or post to Facebook if you want to embarrass yourself. There isn’t any auto-upload functionality (thankfully) so you don’t have to really worry about photos of yourself playing in nothing but underwear uploading automatically. 

In fact, basically all the media that’s recorded on Kinect (there are also videos recorded in several other applications, and videos encoded from motion capture) is cleared through kinectshare.com. I guess while we’re on the subject of motion-capture and media that’s uploaded we can talk about Kinect Adventures’ trophy concept. 

Complete enough adventures, and you’ll get to record a trophy. This is essentially full body motion capture and audio, which some avatar is then set to. There’s a hamster looking creature for single player, and a shark for 2 player - I’m sure there are more beyond there that I haven’t gotten to as well. The concept and result are actually remarkably polished. You can then upload the resulting video to Kinect Share where it remains (like all media) for 14 days for you to download.