LOS ANGELES – Prepare to work up a sweat with the Kinect launch games: Almost every single title Microsoft is showing for its new camera-based motion controller at the Electronic Entertainment Expo here is meant to work your whole body.
Fitness games like Your Shape are built around cardio, and you'd be foolish to think Kinect Sports wasn't going to make you run in place and jump over hurdles. But full-body exercise lurks everywhere in the Kinect launch lineup. Harmonix's dancing game, Dance Central, gets you jumping from side to side. In Kinect Joy Ride, you're leaning into turns and contorting your body to make your go-kart do stunt flips.
Even the cute furry animals of Kinectimals don't seem so cute anymore, once they drag you through a whole race course. Ever try to outrun a tiger? It's tiring.
Microsoft pulled back the curtain on Kinect, formerly known as Project Natal, at this year's E3. The device, which will launch Nov. 4 with 15 different games, uses an array of cameras to sense a player's entire body – the positions of their limbs and their depth in relation to the television. The player can then take full control of every part of a videogame character's body.
Active videogames that get you off the couch and moving around have been a big hit on Wii and have done a lot for gaming's image. The stereotype of the sedentary couch potato clutching a game controller doesn't hold water when you look at the record-breaking sales of Wii Fit and Just Dance. So it should be no surprise that Microsoft and its third-party software partners are chasing casual-gaming dollars with their first batch of Kinect games.
But after playing them at a private loft party in Los Angeles Monday evening, I'd really like to see developers come up with some games you can play on the couch, too. Individual impressions of the games follow.
Kinect Adventures
Developed internally at Microsoft, this collection of mini-games puts you into various adventurous situations. In our first outing in Kinect Adventures (pictured top), we whitewater-rafted down a river filled with ramps, jumps and tokens that we could collect for extra points.
Kinect detected two of us standing in front of it at once, and knew how our individual bodies were moving. As we stepped and leaned to the left and right, the movement's changed the direction in which our inflatable raft was moving. If we jumped, we could propel the raft into the air to collect tokens and go on different paths through the river.
In the next segment, we raced in an obstacle course. We both rode on moving platforms, and had to jump, duck and move from side to side to avoid obstacles, jumping up and contorting our bodies to collect tokens and earn more points. Jumping up and down let us gain speed in our efforts to race each other to the finish line.
Finally, we played the new version of the Ricochet game demoed at last year's E3. The basic idea is still the same – bounce balls toward the TV screen and smash bricks at the end of a long alleyway. Sort of a first-person version of the old Atari game Breakout.
Adventures was probably the most interesting and engaging use of the Kinect technology at the event, since it fulfills that promise of turning you into a videogame character. There's a lot of lag and inaccuracy – my character was roughly mimicking my body's movements a second after I made them. It didn't feel like we were one and the same: I felt like I was working a marionette. But Adventures' mini-games are cleverly designed.
Dance Central
I saw Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos by the Dance Central demo kiosk, and he assured me that what he said at the Microsoft press briefing was not marketing fluff: The creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band really have wanted to make an authentic dance game for a long time.
The problem with existing dance games is that they don't read your entire body, so they really don't know if you're dancing correctly. Dance Central supposedly fixes the disconnect.
Does it work? It seems like it. When I wasn't dancing right, the limbs of the avatar on the game screen started glowing red to show me that my rhythm was out of whack. When I started doing what I thought was probably the correct thing, the onscreen dancer wasn't glowing anymore.
We'll probably need to run more tests, but for now it seems as if Dance Central is really keeping a close eye on your performance. If you really aren't getting the dance moves, the game will slow down and walk you through them.
Just as Rock Band is about making you feel like a rock god, Dance Central is about making you feel like a dancing superstar. The game will let you freestyle in certain places, then take photographs of you as you bust some crazy moves. That seems to be a major feature of most Natal games – taking photos of you when you're doing something ridiculous, then showing you how ridiculous you look.
You know Harmonix will pick the right music: "Poker Face" and "(That Girl Is) Poison" were favorites. And that the company will support the game with a good amount of downloadable content. The only question is whether players will find a deep, engaging game here or just a party diversion.
Kinect Joy Ride
Kinect's requisite racing game lets you grab an invisible steering wheel and drive off without a care in the world. I did a whole lot of experimentation with Kinect Joy Ride to see how well the steering worked, which is a nice way of saying that I smashed into the walls a lot. But on purpose.
Moving my hands a little bit did make tiny adjustments to the car's trajectory, but this does not seem to be a game designed around minute hand adjustments. It's about making big wide turns, leaning to the left and right to make the car drift dramatically, then pushing your hands forward to get a big speed boost and blast past the other characters
It's a fun gimmick, but I don't know if I'd actually want to sit down and play for hours like this. Then again, I don't even really like the Wii Wheel.
We also tried the game's Stunt Mode, in which we had to drive cars up vertical ramps, then lean and weave our bodies to make the cars pull off crazy flips and stunts, which racked up points. This wasn't nearly as intuitive or interesting as just racing the cars, though.
Kinect Sports
Kinect Sports had to happen. In fact, two other collections of sports minigames will launch with Kinect, but this is Microsoft's effort, developed by Rare. We tried two of the game's events – the hurdles and bowling.
Hitting the track, we warmed up, stretched our legs, then ran in place. My friend pointed out that we'd come full circle and were essentially playing World Class Track Meet again.
Ready, set, go: We ran in place, hustling our avatars around the track. When the hurdles in front of us lit up, we leapt into the air to clear them. You can re-enact this in your living room right now and get a sense of what it felt like to play it.
Bowling proved a little more interesting. You reach your hand to the right and your character grabs a ball. Once he has it in hand, you pull your hand up in front of your chest as if you were about to throw it, then swing your hand back and forth naturally to roll it down the alley.
In a clever touch, the arrows on the alley light up to show you where you're aiming the ball. I threw a strike and didn't do too badly on my other frames either, but my friend was throwing her right hand behind the left side of her head every time she rolled the ball, giving it a wicked spin.
Kinectimals
Even Kinectimals, the new virtual pet game, won't let you rest. We used Kinect to scan in a barcode off a plush tiger that will be available in toy stores when the game ships, and the feline showed up in the game ready to entertain.
I did the scratch-the-animal thing that was such a big part of Microsoft's earlier E3 presentation, but the onscreen action didn't really match the movements of my hands. The fingers just moved automatically on the screen, regardless of what my actual fingers were doing. When I moved my hands around, they scratched different parts of the animal's fur, but I decided we should probably try something else.
I didn't know what that might be, but the producer demonstrating the game told me the tiger cub would copy my movements if I stood up, leaned to the right or left, or jumped in the air. Jumping a few times got the beast to copy me and leap around.
After some play time, he brought me a toy, and the game asked if I wanted to try the "agility course." "OK," I answered. (Kinect's voice recognition was turned off, so I had to wave my hand over an icon to register my affirmation.)
And then I was back on the racetrack. The tiger was running through an obstacle course, and I had to show him how to tackle it, which meant jumping, running in place, ducking under barriers, etc.
After a 14-hour day of E3, I was pretty much done at this point. At least Kinectimals rewards you for physical exertion with the unconditional love of a fake animal, which licked and nuzzled the screen affectionately.
Images courtesy Microsoft
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