Kinect

I had the chance to try out the Kinect yesterday evening. Our friends organized a special Kinect party with various games and I was more than happy to attend.Not just for the delicious food (see the phenomenal curry above) but also to see what the big fuss is over this thing. I mean, one million pieces were sold in the first week. That’s totally crazy!

As the console started, my first impression was OMG! You don’t have remotes or controllers anymore. The person is the controller. I’ve read and seen videos about it, but seeing it live I was both shocked and scared. My friends had to literally push me in front of it to try it out. But as soon as I did, I was hooked!

How does it work? You stand about three steps in front of the Kinect and do everything with your hands. It recognizes you and your moves. You hold your hands up where the button is for a second, then it selects it. You hold your left hand on the bottom left corner, then you go back to the previous step. You slide your hands from left to right to move to the next step. Just like in the movies. Remember this scene in Minority Report?

Back then it was all fiction, simulated on the computer but now with Kinect that’s totally possible. Isn’t it amazing?

It has voice recognition so simply by saying “Kinect” and other key words, you can navigate through the menu easily. Based on the player’s body constitution it automatically recognize you and load your profile.

The highlight of the evening was definitely Dance Central. We played Dance Battles against each other and, modesty aside, I was rockin’ it. The songs were the usual pop stuff you hear in the radio these days, like Lady Gaga, Rihanna and so on. It was an amazing experience.

I’ve tried previously the Dance Revolution for Wii and this is nothing like that. In the Wii dance game you must hold the remote and nunchuk in your hands. The basic moves are simply to move left, right, front or behind on the included mat as the arrows appear on the screen.

Well, unlike that Wii game, Dance Central has no remotes or mat or arrows to step on. It’s REAL dancing with REAL moves, just like what you see in all those music video clips on MTV. The choreography is quite hard and we only tried the easiest level. With this game you can really learn how to dance like the stars.

The camera is continuously analyzing your moves so there’s no possibility to cheat. There’s no way you can just sit on the couch eating chips and pretend to be doing tough moves using the console, like with Wii. You’re really sweating on the dance floor. It’s a tough but extremely fun workout.

The Kinect Bundle includes the Adventures games. It has only five games out of which we tried two but this was also a lot of fun. My favorite is definitely Reflex Ridge.

I think it was a good move from Microsoft not to put the Motion Sports in the bundle.Even though I’m not such a great fan of these sports games for consoles, these games are pretty good but it was really annoying that every time we started a game it needed lots of time to load and it’s constantly freezing.

Finally Kinect for Xbox is the best thing Microsoft released in the past few years. Not counting Windows 7 of course.

As a Wii owner, I admit that It’s definitely nothing like the Wii. It’s way cooler than that. This is a whole new gaming concept and it’s a totally mind-blowing experience.

Even though Kinect is currently available for Xbox consoles, Microsoft plans to make it compatible with PCs too, when the Windows 8 will be released in 2012. If Microsoft keeps it up like this, they have a really big chance to take over the gaming world with this one.