By Ned Jordan
You've undoubtedly heard all of the noise that's surrounded Kinect's release
and seen some of the many glowing reviews for it. This will not be one of
them. In fact, it's not a really a review in the true sense, because I
haven't tested the Kinect in many different settings and with the entire range
of launch titles - and in reading some of those glowing reviews on the internet
I have to say that not many reviewers have. Instead, I've decided to write
about the Kinect from the perspective of an out-of-the-box experience and a week
spent goofing around with it off and on between sessions with other games.
Your mileage may vary, but what I experienced should cause you to do some
careful consideration before spending $150 on this peripheral.
The first thing that you should be aware of when considering the Kinect is
that it doesn't have a mounting bracket to attach it to a TV. If you've
got a wall-mounted TV then you're going to have to place it on the floor or prop
it up on something. With a six inch square base and a tendency to adjust
its camera angle at startup, even if you could get it to balance on top of your
screen it's probably not a good idea to do so. There are some third party
mounts available and Microsoft will be providing one in the future, but you
should be aware that it will take more money and some potential installation
work to have the Kinect mounted nicely with your TV. If you have your TV
on a stand, you can place it on the stand in front of the TV but you'll need
about three inches or so of height between the stand and screen if you don't
want the Kinect blocking it.
I was happy to see that the Kinect had both types of connections needed to
support newer and older Xbox 360s included with it in the box, and also to see
that the cable was nice and long at nine feet. It would have been nice if
the cable disconnected from the back of the Kinect instead of being permanently
attached to it. I had to move the Kinect around a lot while setting it up
and that would have made the process a lot easier. For those with
wall-mounted TVs, keep in mind that you'll probably want to run the cabling back
into the wall with your TV's other wires, and so you will have to do some
cable-running and may find yourself in need of a cable extension depending on
how far you need to run it to attach to your Xbox 360.
Once everything is hooked-up and you power-on your Xbox 360, the console will automatically detect your Kinect and take you through a set-up process. It will adjust its viewing angle, sample the room's background noise, and quite probably ask you to turn up the lights and move some furniture out of the room. Kinect can be a little picky about its placement, and at this point you may find yourself having to move it around a bit before it's happy. It can adjust the angle of its view, but it doesn't like being too high or too low and it has to be close enough to the edge of a shelf so that the shelf doesn't block any of its field of view. It was during this part of the process when I discovered it would have been really nice if I could have unplugged the cable from the back of the Kinect itself.
Now here's the important part, and for some reason this critical little piece
of information is alarmingly absent from all of the noise surrounding the
Kinect's release. The specifications for the Kinect indicate that it
requires six feet of space from you to the camera in order to work. The
truth is that it may technically work with six feet of space, but it doesn't
work very well at all with that little room. It will need even more room
to track you consistently, more than that if you're an adult of even average
height, and way more than that if you want to play with another person at the
same time. Kinect needs to see your head, hands, and legs at once, and to
keep all of those in its field of view while you're moving around playing a
game. At about eight feet my head touches the top of its field of view and
it cuts me off at about the knees, and I'm under six feet tall. This
worked well enough for navigating the dashboard menus with Kinect, but games
would constantly lose track of me. I've got the Xbox 360 setup in my
office's game room, with a couch that sits a little over eight feet back from
the sensor, and if I had to guess I'd say that this game room is probably
slightly larger than the living room in my first apartment. If you live in
an apartment, then it's quite possible that you won't have enough space for
Kinect for a single player, let alone two, and if you keep your 360 in a dorm
room then you can just forget about Kinect. I've played with Kinect before
on numerous occasions at E3 and other press events, and in those experiences I
found it to be pretty good, although far from perfect, at motion-tracking.
However, it was always demonstrated in large open areas with plenty of lighting
- the kind of areas that you won't find in a home unless you live in a converted
warehouse or gymnasium. Now I know why - it just doesn't work too well in
an average-sized room.
I'm going to pick on Kinect Adventures a bit, but this is not a review of
that game. Since article is about my out-of-the-box experience with Kinect,
I think that it's fair to use the game that came in the box as the poster child
for Kinect's huge appetite for space. It's rather annoying that each and
every time that you play Kinect Adventures you are forced to go through an
interactive tutorial and calibration session, but the calibration screen does a
good job of showing you just how much space you need to play what is a pretty
simple and basic game at its core. A trapezoid is displayed on-screen to
represent Kinect's viewing area, and a circle is used to represent where you're
standing in that area. Eyeballing it, it looks like the front edge of the
trapezoid sits at seven feet from the sensor and the back of the ideal zone is
at ten or eleven feet - the ideal zone for one player, that is. If you
want to play with two players, you're just getting into the minimum required
space at that point. However, if you're in the front part of that view
area, the game will have trouble tracking you once you start moving.
Kinect Adventures was pretty bad at tracking my feet at eight feet and would
lose me completely if I moved too quickly. Even worse, you have to jump to
begin the rafting game and if that means your head pops out of the top of the
viewing frame, then the game is going to stop and inform you that it can't see
you any more. You'll then have to stand in place slowly moving your hands
in circles so that it can try to find you again. It was really surprising
to me that a motion-tracking game was so intolerant of motion. Now this
problem could have been entirely the game's fault, Kinect's, or a little of
both. As I've noted, I did not try the game in a variety of rooms under
different lighting conditions, but I think that anyone who is thinking of
playing Kinect in an apartment-sized living room, bedroom, or dorm room should
be aware that they probably won't have a great experience with Kinect when they
bring it home.
Even if you have a large-sized room, I'd wait for a while before purchasing
Kinect unless you desperately need it to help burn off some of your kids' extra
energy. The games available at launch are rather shallow. They're of
the novelty variety that will be fun for a few short gaming sessions and then
spend the rest of the time collecting dust somewhere. If you've played Wii
Sports before, then you know what I mean. There's a pretty good chance
you'll play around with it for a week or so, and then go back to traditional
games that can actually hold your interest for hours at a time. Also, if
you think that controlling your Xbox 360 Minority Report style would be cool,
you should know that the reality is that navigating menus in the dashboard with
Kinect is slow and painful. You need to hold a hand up and let it hover
for a few seconds over an icon in order to select it, and in that time you could
already have navigated to the option that you wanted and have selected it using
a controller.
There's some potential in Kinect that a really good game developer could put
to good use - the voice recognition seems to work really well and the facial
recognition is kind of cool as long as you have plenty of lights on - but I see
these as being used as enhancements to traditional games rather than driving a
whole new revolution in gaming (do you really want to play Call of Duty by
running around your living room?). After all, the Wii has had a couple of
years head start on motion gaming and it hasn't driven a true revolution in
gaming. It's a good idea to keep that in mind while you're being bombarded
by Microsoft's marketing barrage.
