Kinect Including Kinect: Adventures!

The kit its self is amazing although their is a minimum height recommendation of around 40 inches (1 meter / just over 3ft) so younger kids won't register correctly with the censor.

I keep seeing people talk about lag, I've not noticed any lag, in fact its very responsive but I think thats down to the fact that I took a little more time to make sure it was calibrated correctly. Our room lighting isn't bright, but it lights the place up and I imagine the lighting also has an affect on how responsive the device is.

If you've calibrated and lit your room but notice some lag, try closing the curtains because perhaps there is some other light affecting your Kinects sensor.

I thought more about how this could be better and some kind of button control for FPS and similar, perhaps a glove control like in Minority Report?

I'm impressed, I love the Wii and I'm an old school Mario fan, but this tops it. Joyride is comparable to Mario Kart.

I just hope there are a… more »

The kit its self is amazing although their is a minimum height recommendation of around 40 inches (1 meter / just over 3ft) so younger kids won't register correctly with the censor.

I keep seeing people talk about lag, I've not noticed any lag, in fact its very responsive but I think thats down to the fact that I took a little more time to make sure it was calibrated correctly. Our room lighting isn't bright, but it lights the place up and I imagine the lighting also has an affect on how responsive the device is.

If you've calibrated and lit your room but notice some lag, try closing the curtains because perhaps there is some other light affecting your Kinects sensor.

I thought more about how this could be better and some kind of button control for FPS and similar, perhaps a glove control like in Minority Report?

I'm impressed, I love the Wii and I'm an old school Mario fan, but this tops it. Joyride is comparable to Mario Kart.

I just hope there are a lot more innovations and games to come. :-)

I waited at my local Asda for an hour last night to get this and after eagerly handing over the money, i rushed home to try it out.

The packaging was average and i found that because i had treat my 360 well (and as such i was running an early 360) i was rewarded with the faff of an aditional adaptor.

After the firmware update - which was quite slow to download bespite having a very fast BB connection - i finally had a working Kinect... well, once i had cleared an enormous amount of room space and added more lighting. I see why they have large, wide open, overlit spaces in the adverts. But thats a small price to pay.

I suppose the control of the dashboard is ok, although not very intuative to start with. However, Kinect isnt about dashboard control, its about game control.

Im sorry to say that despite what you may have heard, this is far from the next generation of game control. Even allowing for the fact that this is new technology to MS, its still noticably… more »

I waited at my local Asda for an hour last night to get this and after eagerly handing over the money, i rushed home to try it out.

The packaging was average and i found that because i had treat my 360 well (and as such i was running an early 360) i was rewarded with the faff of an aditional adaptor.

After the firmware update - which was quite slow to download bespite having a very fast BB connection - i finally had a working Kinect... well, once i had cleared an enormous amount of room space and added more lighting. I see why they have large, wide open, overlit spaces in the adverts. But thats a small price to pay.

I suppose the control of the dashboard is ok, although not very intuative to start with. However, Kinect isnt about dashboard control, its about game control.

Im sorry to say that despite what you may have heard, this is far from the next generation of game control. Even allowing for the fact that this is new technology to MS, its still noticably laggy and lacks the precision of Playstation's Move or even the Wii's wimote, due to the (by modern standards) lower resolution camera. Its also obvious how much processing power this device requires to make it work, which brings me on to the next part...

The game its self plays like a graphicaly enhanced Wii game, with all the inherant flaws there in. It then dawned on me, that this is a very limited controller, in terms of the games you could play. There are no buttons, so any action must only be gesture related. This may work acceptably for puzzle or maybe driving games but it certainly wont work for RPGs or FPSs.

In summary, its an expensive accessory (let's not be shy about it, its nearly the price of a new console), which needs a quite specific environment to work in and has limited use/functionality for the average gamer. Yes, the technology is interesting but its technology for technology's sake.

This control system is slightly behind the wimote and, sadly, miles behind the Playstations Move controller.

The concept certainly isn't new, The playstation 2 with the eyetoy was the first console to introduce controller free gaming using a camera. Of course the technology is now updated with the xbox360, but is it worth 130 pounds?

To be quite frank no, most commentators are hoping firmware updates will fix the faults, unfortunately the kinect uses a very low resolution sensor, so it will never get better at sensing / detecting, firmware cant upgrade hardware. It will always be quite imprecise and will always be quite laggy. The camera itself apparently costs around 35 pounds to make, so there is quite a heavy mark up for the price as well.

There is a reason both Nintendo and Sony turned this technology down, you are the controller, but with no controller you are left to run on the spot to actually run you have no buttons so have no way of firing weapons or using tools.. Its great for dancing and excercise, for anything else its mediocrity at its finest and will probably drop… more »

The concept certainly isn't new, The playstation 2 with the eyetoy was the first console to introduce controller free gaming using a camera. Of course the technology is now updated with the xbox360, but is it worth 130 pounds?

To be quite frank no, most commentators are hoping firmware updates will fix the faults, unfortunately the kinect uses a very low resolution sensor, so it will never get better at sensing / detecting, firmware cant upgrade hardware. It will always be quite imprecise and will always be quite laggy. The camera itself apparently costs around 35 pounds to make, so there is quite a heavy mark up for the price as well.

There is a reason both Nintendo and Sony turned this technology down, you are the controller, but with no controller you are left to run on the spot to actually run you have no buttons so have no way of firing weapons or using tools.. Its great for dancing and excercise, for anything else its mediocrity at its finest and will probably drop down in price quite heavily after christmas.

The technology behind Kinect is impressive and it has the potential to deliver entirely unique experiences that the several motion camera experiments that have already been made for video games consoles never could have come close to. The issue is that none of the games are attempting to offer a compelling experience and Microsoft is doing everything to make their core base of gamers feel excluded from the experience.

My honest suggestion for those who are still on the fence is to wait it out until next year (when the bigger releases pile on; Kinect Star Wars, etc.). Because right now there is certainly no rush to buy this (that is, if you're into motion controls in the first place). No game release as of yet is going to make you certainly rush to the shops just to buy the Kinect.

My concern is finding out how well the Kinect will do in the games department months down the line. Will it continue to give us shovelware like the Wii did? Or will it, in time, bring better and… more »

The technology behind Kinect is impressive and it has the potential to deliver entirely unique experiences that the several motion camera experiments that have already been made for video games consoles never could have come close to. The issue is that none of the games are attempting to offer a compelling experience and Microsoft is doing everything to make their core base of gamers feel excluded from the experience.

My honest suggestion for those who are still on the fence is to wait it out until next year (when the bigger releases pile on; Kinect Star Wars, etc.). Because right now there is certainly no rush to buy this (that is, if you're into motion controls in the first place). No game release as of yet is going to make you certainly rush to the shops just to buy the Kinect.

My concern is finding out how well the Kinect will do in the games department months down the line. Will it continue to give us shovelware like the Wii did? Or will it, in time, bring better and brighter experiences in the gaming world. It's hard to say.