Time Magazine writes about Natal

[Helios]

Bitmap Frogs said:

naznatips said:

Some games just need interface. No one is going to pick a driving game where you hold nothing over one where you hold a wheel, or a sword game where you swing a sword over one where you swing an empty fist. Much less an air guitar over a Rock Band Beatles set.

Also, I dunno how well you guys could see that monitor when they were showing off the avatar controls , but it clearly has difficulty (at the moment) reading finite movement. While it can certainly see large full-body motions, the exact tilt, direction, and location of your hands and feet is not recognized well by this camera. There was also noticeable time delay between the girl's actions and the game's responses to those actions (somewhere between .25 and .5 seconds. Grossly unacceptable). If they really want you to play games using your fists, then finite controls like say holding a gun or swinging a sword would be significantly less accurate than even the Wiimote without motion plus.

There are absolutely some great uses for this in the future, but it is by default far more limited than something that combines motion controls and a human interface, rather than something that just eliminates the human interface altogether. I mean god, people complained about the lack of the second joystick on a Wiimote and the lack of buttons as limiting games. Think about how much this limits them.

 

But that happened to Nintendo as well, they had to add the Motion Plus to the standard Wiimote. This is a testbed for Natal 2.0 that'll debut with the 720.

I think the real difference here is how they are doing it: Nintendo hybridized the traditional control with the casual appeal of motions while Microsoft is building a wall between both worlds. Looking forward we'll see Nintendo building bridges between the casuals and traditional gaming while Microsoft will keep everyone on different rooms.

Exactly. Natal is interesting, and it certainly will find its uses, but it will never be able to play 'traditional' games - not without some kind of controller interface. Nintendo realized that with the Wii, but Microsoft apparently did not.

How will Natal enable you play a first person shooter, or action game, or just about any game where you move in a 3D space? It simply won't. By itself it will only be truly useful for simulations and quirky little minigames, like the ones they showed at the conference. Granted, I assume it will be able to function in tandem with the Xbox controller, and then things might get interesting, but doesn't that defeat the point of the so-called 'interface-revolution'?

Nintendo's biggest fear is, in other words, a loss of PR, rather than the Natal itself. This particular article is so poorly written and obviously biased that I will not comment on it, but if this sentiment prevails among the press (and, ultimately, the public) it might mean something, though frankly I don't anything can change the outcome of the 'console war' at this stage.