Microsoft Kinect: The AnandTech Review
by Brian Klug on December 9, 2010 3:20 PM ESTKinect Games
So, now that we’ve talked about just about everything you can do with Kinect except play games, how does it actually fare as an input paradigm for console gaming? Turns out that it isn’t half bad, in fact, on the whole the Kinect launch titles are actually pretty impressive. We’ve been playing with the launch titles for a while now and are ready to talk about impressions.
Dance Central
It probably makes sense to start with what I consider the most impressive Kinect title, which is far and away Dance Central. The rest of the games are entertaining as well, but something about Dance Central gives has that magical ability to dump you two hours after you started and make it feel like 15 minutes. Oh, and leave you physically sore and exhausted as well.
Dance Central isn’t a first party Microsoft Kinect title, rather it’s developed by Harmonix who unsurprisingly launched Guitar Hero and Rock Band. I’ve never been a big fan of either of those titles, but something about Dance Central appeals. First of all, the menus in Dance Central are actually pretty notable - it’s a different (and in my estimation) better navigation schema than what I’ve seen in the other Kinect titles and dashboard, and it’s shockingly simple. My girlfriend's impression was that the Dance Central menus had a striking similarity to the omnipresent arcade title Dance Dance Revolution.
You hold your hand out and angle it up to scroll up, down to scroll down, and swipe left to select. Swiping right with your left hand goes back. That’s really all there is to it, and it works so well I wish the main Xbox dashboard leveraged these gestures somehow. Supposedly Harmonix invested a lot of time into doing something different with their menu navigation scheme, and it really did pay off here.
There’s a selection of 32 titles that come with Dance Central, and a few more that you can buy for 240 Microsoft Points (which works out to $3) from the Xbox marketplace. The titles seem to be reasonably varied, ranging from some disco hits to Basement Jaxx and Snoop Dogg. I was surprised to actually find more than a few titles I was familiar with.
After you select a song, you can do a few different things - learn the dance, challenge a second person, use it as an exercise and track calories burned, or just dance it. The learning interface inside Dance Central itself is shockingly intuitive. Watch the avatar do a dance move from part of the dance, and then try your best to emulate it. Parts of the dance you’re doing wrong will be highlighted in red on the avatar on the appropriate part of your body. Fail to move your arm right, and it’ll show up in red. A circle under the avatar glows different colors depending on how close to emulating the dance move you come.
If you already know the move, you’ll get a perfect score and move to the next one. Most likely (unless you’re already some sort of dance wizard), you’ll get it wrong a few times. Three correct emulations moves you to the next move, and a few successive failures results in the move being skipped. What’s super useful, however, is the ability to “break it down” in slow motion. Swiping right with your left hand instantly slows the move down, and makes the commentator vocalize exactly the moves you should be making with the beat.
At the very end, you have to perform the song with the appropriate moves repeated and spliced in where they belong. Do well, and you’ll get transported to some kind of nightclub with cheering fans and flashing lights. Fail too many dance moves too hard, and you’ll be stuck on a boardwalk or the lunchroom. The commentator voice doesn’t really pull punches either - if you mess up or score low, you’re going to know about it.
On the whole, Dance Central is surprisingly entertaining and polished. Not only is the menu user interface and gesture choice extremely well done, but move recognition in dances themselves are very good. I only ran into problems with one particular dance move - the jazz square. This particular move requires moving your feet in a square, and although it doesn’t look particularly hard, Dance Central refused to recognize me doing it. I attributed this originally to a particular pair of cargo shorts (only this pair of shorts gave me problems), but ran into it later again at another location with different clothing. I had my family try the move and they too experienced some problems.
Certain moves are more picky than others, and most of the time they were a consequence of me not exaggerating my movements enough to really emulate the whole dance. But there are a few moves - particularly ones that involve specific depth-sensitive feet movements - that are a bit finicky. Again, having good depth contrast and making sure you’re in the field of view of the sensor is critical, and you’re luckily provided a small window with the depth image while playing so you can stay inside the optimal region.
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Noriaki - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Yeah, I just meant the 350 part. Referring to it as the 360 S to distinguish it from the 360 Pro makes sense to me.Noriaki - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
PS: Thanks for the in-depth coverage. This is the first time I feel like I got a good idea of what having a Kinect in my living room would mean for practical things like where my couch lives.Aikouka - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Brian, have you tried out DanceMasters (DM)? I noticed you commented on how your girlfriend compared Dance Central (DC) to DDR where DanceMasters is actually created by Konami.I own DM and have played the DC game, and I have to say... you'd probably be disappointed in the DM menu system as it is a tad bit harder to control. Way too often I found myself skipping past the option I wanted (as all options move left or right) and you then have to raise your (right) hand to select it. The problem comes when it might see you move your hand out to the right and actually shift your choice over one right before you raise your hand.
The part where I think DM beats DC is the actual dancing. In the demo for DC, I found it awkwardly difficult to pay attention to the way the dancer was moving (left or right, etc) and the upcoming movement that was shown on the right side of the screen. When my brother and his girlfriend played, I noticed one huge trend... we *all* would miss the first dance move after they changed from one move to another.
This is kind of better in DM, because it uses arrows that signify how your hand (or hands) should move in a second or two. There are also circles that will appear on the screen and you must hit them with either your hands or feet (obvious depending on the location). The last movement is the "pose silhouettes" that appear on the left and right side and are green in color. They move to the center of the screen and when the two silhouettes combine, you are supposed to be in that pose. The only problem is that it's not terribly picky on what you do in between these three types of inputs and another problem is that it loves to put circles beneath your feet (so you keep moving), but they're hard to notice. I found this easy to combat by simply always moving your feet.
Overall, there's a huge difference in the style of music between the two as well, which influenced my decision. I've never been a "Top 40s" kinda guy and I've played DDR quite a bit, so I went with the game that had the music style I was used to ( and also considering that I've heard quite a bit of Eurobeat, which DM also has ).
The one thing that was always fun about DC was the "freestyle" section where it shows you as this sort of glowing silhouette and you just do whatever dance you want. At the end, it will play this back to you in a sort of time-lapse video (which you can then save).
To talk about a different game, I noticed some problem with jumping in Kinect... mostly in the rail-based obstacle course. Maybe I was just doing little hops and Kinect didn't register it... maybe it was a problem with the cargo pants (khaki color, so they're fairly flesh-toned) that I was wearing. It was pretty crazy though... at one point I had to duck down, so I dropped to my knees and then needed to switch sides, so I pulled out the Starfox-esque barrel roll! Kinect did actually sense that correctly.
The one thing I did notice is that it is *very* common in Kinect Adventures for it to yell at me about getting too close or too far... especially in the bubble popping mini-game.
Brian Klug - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I haven't checked out Dance Masters, but I'm starting to think that I definitely should. I think at the time when I originally put together this list of games, that wasn't available and I overlooked it. I'll grab it and maybe update with a page or two.It's interesting how dancing games are quickly becoming something Kinect is very well suited for. I definitely agree about jumping and the clothing choice, I have a pair of cargo shorts that just don't work with most of the titles, and Kinect Adventures does yell a lot about position, agreed.
-Brian
GSJ - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
If only i could use this with my p.c.....ExarKun333 - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I purchased the Kinect soon after the launch and I came to pretty much the same conclusions are Brian. The lag is there, but acceptable. More importantly, the games are FUN. MS did a great job with this launch. The hardware is easy to install and configure, and the games are easy to pick up on. I agreed 100% that the menus in DC are superior to the method in the Dashboard. Maybe an update at some time? :)knowom - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
267ms on a DAW would be completely unthinkable in fact most people that play or record music try to stay below 10ms.I'm just using that example as a clear easy to demonstrate reason to why 267ms is a abysmal amount of input lag you can completely rule out music based kinect games as well as any twitch/quick reflex input games or applications.
SodaAnt - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
In the comment about the laser probably being 650-700 nm, that is wrong. 650nm is the wavelength of a normal red laser pointer. Normal IR diodes lase at either 780, 808 or 980nm.Brian Klug - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Hmm it's on the fringes of what I'd consider visible, but 780 probably is a much better choice. I'll update.-Brian
mcnabney - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Okay, I am probably the only prig to bring this up, but the distances required seem to be a problem for some not often thought of reasons.9-12 feet of clearance appears to be required, which means the sofa will need to be 15' back (unless you move it every time you fire up the Kinnect).
I would point out that you would need to have a 55"+ HDTV to fully benefit from the 1080p image from the Kinnect playing area, For regular game playing / movie watching on the sofa (behind the playing area) you would require a 100"!!!!! screen to fully resolve the 1080p image that the Xbox360 or a BluRay player is capable of displaying.
For this thing to really work in a robust media environment (and most living rooms) it should have been able to to work perfectly with the user standing 3-5' from the screen.