In this video me and Tamak have our first hands on experience with Kinect.

After many months of slating Kinect for first increasing the price, and then announcing their game line-up, we thought it was about time we actually plugged one in and gave it a go. It’s easy to hate Kinect for how Microsoft have handled the development and release, with their over-the-top promos and wild ambitions, but we tried to get past all of that and just try it out for ourselves.

I was pretty impressed and enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I’m impressed by the technology and how you can interact with the games. The fact that you just stand up and wave and Kinect scans your face, identifies you and logs you in – is pretty cool. However it’s all a bit sluggish, menus take ages to navigate through, and fast reaction games often suffer from a bit of latency (lag) as it tries to map your responses. It also is a bit impractical. The ideal position for the sensor would be to have it above and slightly behind your tv, but they’ve built it in a housing that sits down low in front of your tv, which drastically reduces how much room you have. You can buy stands and wall mounts for it but they should’ve thought this through. You’re gona need quite a large living room to play Kinect, one player aint too bad given you’ve got about 10feet of space, but two player was a squash even after we dragged the sofas outa the way, and it constantly lost tracking. If you’ve got a huge lounge this aint gona be a problem, but people with less space will struggle.

Overall it was fun, and left me wondering whether to pick one up over Christmas? I’m still unsure… It’s a great replacement for the Wii and blows it well and truly outa the water, but the majority of my Xbox gaming will still be standard FPS titles and RPG’s and I don’t see them jumping to adopt Kinect for some time. Great for parties though!

Thanks guys and I hope you enjoy the video :)