Microsoft's new Kinect sensor-control system is massively ambitious: the idea is that it allows you to play games with no controllers whatsoever. And, when it works, the effect is nothing short of astonishing, especially for non-gamers who are very obviously the intended core audience. But the Kinect is rife with impractical design ideas, saddled with a too-high price tag, and, ultimately, fails to achieve what it's been advertised to do -- bring people together for live party gaming sessions.
First, the cool stuff: Kinect, when it works, is pretty freakin' slick. Showing your friends how you can navigate menus on your TV like Tom Cruise did in Minority Report is definitely going to impress. Some game genres that would be totally impossible using a traditional control system, or even motion controllers, are brilliantly realized on Kinect, especially dancing and "sports" titles. And, technically speaking, the Kinect is easily one of the most advanced pieces of technology that gamers have ever had the privilege of getting our grubby little hands on.
Unlike, say, the Wii or Playstation Move, which rely on a sensor receiving information from a controller, Kinect continuously projects an infra-red 3D box around your living room, and tracks changes (that is, movements) within that box. Its tracking ability is so fine-tuned that it's able to recognize facial features and log you into XBOX Live just by looking at your face. It does have some trouble in certain lighting conditions, but most of the doom and gloom you've heard about this is hype: you just need to make sure to calibrate the Kinect once for each set of lighting conditions you want to play in, and it'll be fine from then on. It's also got complex voice-recognition capabilities, allowing you to communicate clearly with your buddies without the need for a headset, even if there's some ambient noise (like, say, an air conditioner).
The problems start to crop up, however, when you realize that something so technically complex can't be as brainlessly easy to use as they make it seem in the commercials. First, Kinect requires a lot of empty space for you to play in -- at least a six-foot square area that's completely empty of furniture and other people. Kinect will often admonish you to "move furniture if you need to" during loading screens, but for most of us, it isn't as simple as pushing the sofa out of the way. And if you want to play with friends you'll need even more space to accommodate the extra set of swinging limbs, but this actually end up not being a big deal because the hard truth is Kinect can't register more than one person at a time. It constantly loses track of players, interrupting the action and incessantly prompting you to return to sensor range when you're both standing smack in front of the sensor.
And that, unhappily, is where Kinect really deserves to be taken to task. Microsoft's marketing and Kinect's initial games lineup makes it clear that this is not a peripheral aimed at the hardcore crowd that makes up the 360's core install base; rather, this is meant to be a family friendly add-on, something that you can get your parents and kids involved with. So it's all the more infuriating that it does such a poor job of registering multiple users at once, thereby ruining its obviously huge potential as a 'party device' on the same level as the Wii.
It's no coincidence that most of the so-called "multiplayer" titles for Kinect (like the otherwise really fun Dance Central from Harmonix) involve sequential play rather than true simultaneous multiplayer. Things do work decently if you go for simultaneous online play, but getting people together in the same room for some living room fun -- the same sort of fun that helped make the Wii such a powerhouse -- is impossible because the Kinect technology simply isn't capable of making it happen.
Kinect fares much better in keeping track of a lone gamer, but it still frequently feels like you're wrestling with it; as if movements aren't truly one-to-one. For example, two launch titles, Kinect Adventures and Sonic Free Riders, emphasize leaning your body in a specific direction to steer your onscreen avatar, but these often demand exaggerated and uncomfortable motions rather than subtle, intuitive gestures; in short, you often have to overcompensate to get the results you want. And since Kinect offers no tactile feedback, there's never a sense of how much more or less you ought to be move in order to achieve fine changes in trajectory.
By far Kinect's worst problem, however, is the lag time between when you make a motion and when it registers onscreen. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the launch titles that will be addressed as developers familiarize themselves with the device, or if it's something inherent to the tech, but regardless, it's a big problem. The lag is slight to be sure, but it's enough to throw you off, and it necessitates movements that are anticipatory rather than reactionary, making every game an exercise in clairvoyance rather than reflexes. In Kinect Sports, for example, the track-and-field section demands that players make jumping or throwing motions at precise times, but the lag frequently leads to foot faults or hit hurdles when you end up acting too late; to compensate, I started moving a few seconds before it made sense to visually, which ruins the flow of the game.
Of course, the apologists, along with Microsoft, will say that these are all small hiccups that will get addressed over time; they'll also point out that these minor technical issues pale in comparison to the new opportunities Kinect's unique capabilities will open up. But I am not reviewing what the devicecould achieve -- rather, I'm here to judge it on what it's capable of right out of the box, and frankly, it feels like it's two or three revisions away from living up to its potential. If it did work up to spec, I could talk about its ability to compete against the Wii and the Move, and its potential for bringing entirely new genres to the table. But for now, it's less a matter of what it can do and more a matter of what it can't.
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