I’ve been reading articles left and right about Kinect’s “shortcomings.†While I feel that it has shortcomings I’m not going to harp on it because I see it for what it was meant to be: a gimmick to top that of the Wii, or in other words a business plan to increase sales. The life-cyle of the Xbox 360 is on the decline and this is an attempt to bring in a bigger audience and garner fresh sales. Now all the buzz it got only a year ago has turned to skepticism: It only supports 2 players, it showed some lag on Jimmy Kimmel, and now a report that analyzes all of the shortcomings before the product even hits shelves and predicts it flopping.
None of these new motion control systems are without fault. In fact the ones we have now aren’t all that great. What we will have by the end of 2010 is a gimmick war that doesn’t show a whole lot of promise for the game industry.
The Wii- It’s far from new, but it deserves mention first because it birthed this whole notion of needing some kind of motion controller to play games. The Wii’s controls were under-utilized though. How many games have you played for the Wii that really seemed to utilize the control method effectively? One of the best examples I can think of is Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and it worked brilliantly in that. Then it gradually turned into an exercise machine and it seemed like motion controls were just turned into a point and click deal.