Now onto the good stuff, Kinect. After you go through all the calibration work which I admit is slightly tedious, the magic begins to happen.. You see yourself controlling your tv with your hands and I felt just like Tom Cruise in 'Minority Report' it was awesome, a real sense of power. The camera recognized me incredibly well and followed me when I wanted it to. The voice recognition is also very good, I truly love just sitting on the sofa and if I can't reach my controller, just telling my Xbox what I want! If it could just put specific disks on its tray on command it would be perfect. But seriously it is a very impressive piece of kit. I was most impressed by the Kinect ID, I had a few friends recover their accounts onto my xbox and set up Kinect ID and the second a different person walked infront of the camera, Kinect recognized them and logged them in. Amazing.
Yes there are some annoying aspects, like why couldn't the Kinect hub just be the whole Xbox dashboard, I know it might take some more work but it would make the experience so much better! Instead of being limited to what you can do. The features inside the Kinect hub however are very impressive, such as Zune and Sky, telling your xbox to pause when I am going to get a drink is great, but why can't I do this is I just put a dvd in? It's very annoying! But lets hope for a software update to fix these issues. Another problem a lot of people have with Kinect is not necessarily what it does, but getting it to work in your space. As you may or may not know, Kinect needs at least 6ft to function properly with one person and if there is two of you you need at least 8ft, for me this isn't a problem after I move my sofa a little, but it can be a bit of a pain! However I think if you were to think logically about this, it makes sense.. You can't expect this camera to recognize your whole body when you stand 1ft away!
Now onto 'Kinect Adventures'. I personally love this game, its great when you have a few friends over and you have a few drinks to just get the idea of what Kinect is all about! It has 5 mini games for you to play and an adventure mode where you play through these mini games at different difficulties, collecting treasures and other goodies. This is very fun for the first hour or so of playing, but it does get very tedious, there is not much diversity in the game and when you play on your own you seem just a little bit stupid.
Kinect Adventures is certainly a game to be played with friends and when you are playing on your own and a friend decides he wants in, he just steps next to you and hey presto you are in the game. The game like I said gives you a great change to see how accurate the Kinect camera is and it is very impressive. Even stupid things like high fiving your friend after a game is registered! One of the most entertaining thing is to see your after the game photo shots, you see you and your friend jumping in the air, sticking your legs and arms out to try and collect joins, its very entertaining. The problem is like I said before, it gets boring. You can't play this game for hours on end, but its a good start for Kinect, allowing you to see what you are getting yourself in for! I personally am very happy, I enjoy playing it with family and friends and its just nice to see that Kinect does what Microsoft said it would do!
My final verdict on Kinect so far 7/10. Yes there are a few little things that are annoying like I mentioned, but its very impressive and holds a huge potential for the future and that is all you can really judge it on, what it can and might do, not what its doing already! But so far so good! I look forward to the future.
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