My afternoon with Kinect (impressions)

[binary solo]

Interesting review MGT2000. If they want the casual audience with Kinect (which is necessary to drive higher 360 sales) then the the lag issues either need to be rendered irrelevant (Dance Central) or made easy for the player to compensate.

There's lag with Move, but in Sports Champs it's short enough or it's managed by the game such that I subconsciously compensated immediately on first playing the game to the point that I basically don't perceive any lag, despite it definitely being there. One way to aid player compensation while creating the perception that there's no/little lag is to provide visual cues to the player about when an action (jumping/ducking) should be taken. E.g. in Sports Champions in volley ball the game puts a green halo around the ball indicating the optimum time to take your action (dig/set/smash). The green halo appears slightly before you'd naturally take a swing at the ball, hence the game is getting you to compensate for the lag, but your perception in the moment is that there's no lag because you've never missed the ball from timing it wrongly because of the lag.

If Kinect games trigger you to take those actions a split second before you'd take them in a real world setting then lag won't cause any frustration. If those cues aren't given then some people might get frustrated with getting the timing right.