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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
72 Comments
View All Comments
Quidam67 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I agree with this. The distance is just not realistic for most lounge set ups. I could go minimalist and ditch the sofa, and you know, just sit on the floor, but really, that's asking a lot just so I can play Kinnect games.Aloonatic - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Unrealistic for most living rooms, so how on earth they expect this to fly in many kids bedrooms too, I have no idea. And how many kids have TVs taht would be big enough to be viewed that well from those sorts of distances too.Kinect seems like a great idea and tech that is perhaps just a little ahead of it's time, so unusable by many, even if they really really really* wanted to.
* One would need to really really really really want to use Kinect to justify moving to a new house so that you might be able to :o)
Nataku - Monday, December 13, 2010 - link
I've actually seen the toy in action at the mall and people were standing only 4~5' away and it seems to work ok... im getting the feeling that the bigger you are the further back you need to be and if your only a kid you can be much closer than an adult would be able to...i don't see how screen size is an issue though, they are demoing these things off of 27"~30" TV sets...
Patrick Wolf - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Kinect is going to be the new Wii, everyone will have one but no one will use it. Actually not everybody since not everyone can use it.Quidam67 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Not that I want to come across all negative, but given how long ms have been working on this complex project (I assume as a means to stretch the 360's lifespan and to invade the Wii's market at the expense of snubbing their existing one) I have to say this is just a big non-event for me. Honestly, I wish they had put their resources into putting out an "evolutionary" upgrade.I mean, this idea that the next gen of console has to be based on completely new hardware, with incompatible development tools, so everyone is starting froom zero is a paradigm I challenge. Why couldn't they treat it like a PC upgrade? Release a new xbox 540 that is fully software compatible with all the old 360 games I own now (without resorting to buggy and expensive software emulation) but has at least twice the memory, perhaps an extra couple of cores, a more powerful gpu. eg true 1080p gaming support.
Then they could start transitioning over to the new machine by releasing a game that will run on both machines, but will allow better graphic settings if you are running it on the new rig. I don't know, maybe I'm just bummed out that this gen of consoles is really starting to show its technological age, and I don't see how tacking on an impractical new control device prolongs the lifespan of such dated hardware. To say nothing of what this means for PC games, which are now largely driven by the console market.
Disappointed
mcnabney - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I thought the purpose of the console is to 100% compatibility for all owners with all games?What you are describing is more like a PC with incrementle improvements to the system from year to year.
Quidam67 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
In a sense, yes, but the hardware is still far more controlled. It's not like you can buy a GPU and swap it out with the old one. I'm just suggesting a more evolutionary approach, and one that offers better compatibility with the technology that preceeded it.The game console industry has never worked that way, but I don't think that is in itself a reason why this is not a good idea. I know for a fact some high profile developers abandoned the console industry precicely because all their assets were rendered redundant every time a new round of consoles came out.
It doesn't have to be that way.
dustcrusher - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Almost every incremental console upgrade attempted thus far has been a huge failure. Atari 5200, Sega CD, Sega 32X- need I go on? Coleco had a couple of minor successes in the Expansion Module 1 and the ADAM but neither were money makers- in fact, the ADAM was one of the first consoles with cheap and easy piracy, so Coleco lost a ton on it.The cost in time and money would be better spent on the Xbox 720, or whatever the next system will be.
And for a Springer-esque Final Thought, it's the fun that counts. The latest and greatest tech means nothing if the games aren't fun, and the majority of new games that tout bleeding edge graphics engines seem to be derivatives of the same tired formulas. Honestly, with a couple of exceptions I've gotten the most mileage from my 360 out of Live Arcade, because the games there focus on being fun first.
Quidam67 - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
With all due respect, those consoles are hardly comparable to the sort of market-share and brand recognition that that the Xbox 360 now enjoys.You say the time would be better spent developing the 720,which I assume entails the same as all the other new gen consoles, ie. no legitimate backwards compatibility, and an architecture designed to reduce manufacturing costs at the expense of requiring a whole new set of development tools -an extremely complex and expensive re-enineering task just to get you back to where you were before.
I can only speak for myself, and yes maybe I do think differently from the masses, but if ms had launched a xbox 540 with say a Gears of War 3 enhanced version that ran in 1080p on the new console, I'd be all over it. The Kinnect, on the other hand is not something I'd want on my machine even if they offered to me for free. All it would do is gather dust.
gvaley - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
"...267 ms is seriously laggy, but right now it doesn’t matter too much. Maybe when we get FPS titles that’ll change."The way businesses work, I expect to see a ton of intentionally crippled AI in upcoming Kinect FPS games so you can have enough time to shoot the target.
Not that this will be a one off. Every time something goes hip the technology bends back to cash in on it, pushing back progress with years in some cases. (Think of the iPhone/Android and the way smartphones are built today. For us people who were used to their high-end pre-smartphone era Sony Ericssons or Nokias, smartphones are a huge setback in terms of usability. [The volume rockers regulate ringer volume? Really? That's the dumbest idea ever. Not only it's not helpful, it's actually dangerous 'cause you can incidentally turn silent mode off and miss that important call.])
Having said that, I'm eager on Kinect 2 in several years when the technology (and price) would allow for most kinks to be ironed out.