| Reasonable said: I'm compaing Natal to Wii. I'm asking myself why I'd want to swing my arms at nothing with no feedback when I can swing my arms with feedback? For Natal to really take off it seems to me it need to offer a supeiror gaming experience to Wii (and I guess Sony Wand) and I'm actually not sure on the evidence so far it does. I will wait to see what titles ship with it, but right now I'm pretty much convinced that stuff like tennis, bowling, etc. will all be better on Wii. Natal needs titles where the camera approach is superior to Wii I think, not just a different version with no real difference and potentially less immersion. I love everything about Natal as an inteface - in fact I can't wait to hook it up to my gaming PC if MS make good on that promise, but I do have doubts about it's impact on gaming. In US I think it will do best, due to 360 position and it's appeal as a futuristic device, but even there the Wii is pretty entrenched and I could see Sony still having decent brand awareness with the average Joe in the street. I'm just saying I don't see Natal as a slam dunk by any means from a gaming perspective. I think MS are taking a fair bit of a risk with Natal, particularly when so many people have already got a Wii.
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One obvious superiority is the ability to track the legs and head as well as the arms. This allows for what I call a 1:1 representation not only in terms of the motion, but also the space. The player moves left 3 feet in real life, the character moves left 3 feet in the game. If there is a hole in the ground, the game can track the players legs to see if they stepped or jumped over it. This allows for completely immersive versions of tennis, dodgeball, etc(and extreme versions of these sports, ie. fire puts, spikes, etc that must be avoided). Sure this could take more space than usual, but I am pretty excited about the concept of competing in dodgeball against someone over Live. Hell entire teams could compete.
But it isn't just the motion aspects of Natal that are intriguing. It is the complete package of vocal recognition, facial recognition, and motion recognition. Developers don't have to worry about whether the console or hardware has been patched to allow these thigns, it is available right out of the box, no third party software needed to be purchased in order to ease development. Even if just using the controller, vocal recognition is there, facial recognition is there. The game could detect when a player is mad due to tone or facial expressions and react accordingly. Motion is just one aspect, albeit a rather large one, of a rather impressive package for developers to utilize.
