Kinect user discussion thread

I will check it out and let you know.

Update: Tried it with the offline campaign mode. Using Kinect for voice commands works just as well as using the head set. I thought it wasn't picking up my commands, at times but it was. I will obviously have to use it more to trust not having the head set, but it does work. I did not need the buttons for commands.

 

I believe there are a number of high intensity workouts. I did the "Nice and Easy" one last night, and it almost killed me. Nice and Easy my ass... I love how they tied achievements to calories burned, I'm sure there are a lot of Achievement hounds working up a real sweat right now.

I'm trying to beat the champion level AI on table tennis at the moment. That bugger cheats, I tell you. It's almost impossible to get a smash past him. Professional I can beat regularly now.

Glad it worked for you. It's using the chat pipeline as far as I know, so it should just work seamlessly.

 

Yeah, I'm finding that this part is what I like most about Kinect. It's the first game where I really FEEL good after playing a game. Again I can't say this enough but it reminds me when I was a kid. Running around the neighborhood and every game we played as kids was a physical activity. Coming home all sweaty and out of breath, etc.

If this can get todays couch potatoey kids to get that level of activity while playing on a "video game," that would just be absolutely phenomenal.

And yeah, right now I'm not sure if I'd actually want much less like a Kinect game that didn't feature lots of physical activity.

Point and click adventure games for example would be perfect for this, searching around the screen with your hands for things and then actually picking them up and putting them in your pocket. But even though I love adventure games, I just feel more drawn to games that might at least make me break out in a light sweat.

If possible, Kinect has far surpassed my expectations for it. And I find I'm far more impressed with the experience now than I was when it was first revealed as Natal or at anytime leading up to launch. It isn't perfect obviously, but I already knew what the potential drawbacks were. And when it comes right down to it, those drawbacks don't matter one single bit.

I certainly hope MS doesn't lose focus on Kinect. I want physically taxing video games now and for as long as I can still physically move.

Hell, just imagine when the Olympics come around again and you have your flood of Olympic type games. The possibilities there just make me want them now.

Regards,
SB

 

And it dose. Great work, and thank you and your peers for the great family gameing too!

 

Fight Night is coming next summer, and I hope those bastards at least include a Kinect mini-game or game mode, even if it isn't compatible with the full-fledged game.

 

Meant to try out Kinect Adventures, but ended up boxing for 45 minutes after my workout. And I've developed my first Kinect injury - a small blister. Seems my lead food started to develop a bit of a blister while I was boxing. I noticed boxing does some head tracking, because you can lean side to side a little. I don't think it really does anything though.

 

I seriously think I may have a defective kinect. When I say Xbox, while sitting on my couch 8-10 feet away in a quite room, it often, almost always, doesn't recognize it as a command. I basically have to yell at it. Is this normal? Calibrated twice already.

Also, it's often really hard to get it to recognize my wave to go to the kinect hub. I'm not sure if I'm doing it wrong or what.

I just think this is terrible for MS if the most basic way of turning Kinect on, the wave, is as troublesome for most users as me. exceedingly frustrating.

However the kinect adventures game seems to work ok.

 

That does not match up with my experience. Maybe you are not waving long enough? A little icon should come up at the bottom right showing that it is recognizing your wave. As for the voice commands, mine can pick me up with quite a bit of background noise.

The only problem I have is with the Kinect ID feature, because I have fairly dark room with inconsistent lighting. I have two lamps in different places that can't light the whole room. So depending on where I'm standing, the recognition seems inconsistent, even after calibrating several times.

 

That's the one consistent issue I'm hearing as well, from various gaming podcasts and such. The rest I haven't heard much about and generally most people are impressed with the voice commands, when they are available (and disappointed they aren't so widely available)

 

I had trouble at first until I noticed that for the wave graphic (that quarter circle thing) has a blue area that shows where your wave is. If you do a deliberate wave, you should see it track your wave. Then just make sure to do a deliberate wave so the tracking goes all the way from one side of the quarter circle to the other side and back again.

I rarely have trouble with it now. As to voice, I haven't used it much (no Zune yet, no ESPN3) but it seems to work well for me when I have tried it.

Regards,
SB

 

Ok, debug time. Can you send me a picture of your setup? How loud did you calibrate at? Where is the Kinect placed? Is it near or on top of any speakers? Do you have it fed through a receiver? Digital or analog? Does your receiver have any effects running (Night mode/DRC, Dolby Pro Logic, reverb (hall/stadium/etc))?

 

the more i play with kinect, the more i realize the Wii dropped the ball by not having multiplayer in Wii Sports. Kinect Sports is just awesome fun online with chat.

 

Went to BB today and seen Kinect for the first time in person. Kinect adv was being displayed. Did not try myself but it seems to perform as expected from watching the videos. From the games I seen thus far I don't think its my cup of tea but I think my three yr old would like the Kinect animals game. Sales wise I think it will be a hit, noticed an older couple with the 360 bundle.

 

I don't blame Wii Sports, that's fine - it was built with offline in mind and that's the audience it has managed to reach. But for Sports Champions it would have been really nice.

 

Yep, is a real letdown in sports champions, the table tennis in SC online could very well be the best thing ever!

 

And that's as far as I wanted to take it off-topic.

Summary: good job Microsoft on getting online to work and work well in these games.

 

Finally go around to the Zen exercises in Your Shape. They're the "cool down" activities for the title. And I have to say the skeletal tracking for the Tai Chi moves are fairly exacting. In some places it gives some leeway on postures (arm, legs, body) and in some it's quite strict. I like it, especially when it's fairly strick on where your arms and legs are. It also points out quite well how I'm not very flexible compared to my younger years. Looking forward to improving on that as well as overall shape and fitness.

Also found out that in the smash blocks activity, that for the blocks you have to "knee." You not only have to knee high enough by you have to knee across your body. I had initially thought that it wasn't tracking correctly. But instead it turns out I was doing it wrong. Smash blocks is turning out to be one of my favorite activities in there. As your score can be ramped by by performing each punch and knee faster. I find myself trying to top each previous top score and working up quite a sweat. Once you get knees involved it gets quite a bit more involved. Great stuff.

Oh and in the balance board one, it pays to also move side to side to stack blocks for higher scores.

Regards,
SB

 

Everything is supposed to be across your body, except for the squats...I have been hit in the head a couple times by the pendulum but it is so much fun. For the balancing I stay really low to accumulate the blocks faster but the fire extinguishing can be tricky at times.

 

I have this theory that people who think Kinect doesn't work are actually just uncoordinated people. On Saturday, I think I saw my theory proved true a little bit. A friend of mine came over, and he's a particularly stiff and awkward person. He struggled with some things, mostly because if he'd been trying to do them in real life he would have failed. A simple things like getting the waving to recognize him was hard.

I said, "Wave at the screen to log in."

He says back to me, "It isn't working right." His arm was outstretched straight in front of him, and his elbow wasn't bent. He was moving his hand in almost a circular motion.

I said, "Hey, wave like a normal human being with your elbow bent." Maybe he felt like he had to point at the camera to get it to work, and was trying to stick his hand in the camera's "face" to make it more apparent, but actually ended up doing something that didn't resemble waving at all. I should have asked why he was doing that.

Then he says to me, "It still isn't working." This time he had his elbow bent, but he was moving his hand so little, that it almost looked like he wasn't waving his hand at all.

"Wave your hand like you're waving at someone across the street," was how I finally explained to him how to get it to work. After that, no problems, until we started playing games. Boxing went ok, but he threw his punches pretty awkwardly. Table tennis was a weird one. He kept saying it wasn't working, but when I was watching, half the time he said he was swinging, he wasn't even moving his hand at all, or he was swinging on his forehand when the ball was passing his player on the opposite side. It was like he couldn't map the character to what he was doing at all. Whatever part of the brain maps spatial relations, just couldn't handle responding to the positioning of the ball relative to his character on screen. He started to get the hang of it, but was struggling at first, where I'd picked it up and was slamming shots on my first try.

This is a guy who has never been good at sports. He's right handed, but has problems with his right hand, so taught himself from an early age to be a lefty. Sports just weren't something he ever got good at. So this begs the question, with varying experiences with Kinect, and knowing gamers tend not to be incredibly active sporting people: Is there an inherent problem in motion gaming, in that some people just aren't good at motion?