ArnoldRimmer said:
None of the given answers perfectly fits my opinion of Kinect, which is why I prefer to tell my opinion of Kinect in detail. It's rather detailled, so if it's too long for you simply don't read it.
I should start by admitting that I was never very interested in Kinect games. Being a software developer always interested in new gadgets, I was somewhat interested in experimenting a bit around with the new technology, but I wasn't really interested in Kinect games. It's interesting technology of course, I definitely see the possibilities TOF cameras like Kinect offer in certain areas like robotics. But when it comes to gaming, I considered the expensive 150$ Kinect hardware to offer only few advantages over a cheap 5$ webcam/microphone (low light conditions for example). And I thought that the absence of any kind of controller would mean that Kinect only fits a very limited range of games: Sports, Dance, Fitness games and mini games - so exactly the genres that the EyeToy was known for.
I was never willing to pay 149 for Kinect, but with Kinect street prices constantly dropping I recently ended up buying Kinect when I saw a Kinect PLUS Kinect Adventures PLUS Dance Central bundle offered for 130 bucks. By selling the sealed copy of Dance Central I effectively paid about 100 for the Kinect hardware, which I think is okay. I didn't actually touch it for some time, but when friends came over I thought that would be a good time to finally give Kinect a try and I rented the three most popular Kinect games: Kinect Sports, Dance Central and Your Shape.
Installation was surprisingly short and easy. Rearranging the furniture to meet the space requirements for example was less of a problem than I was originally expecting. There was no setup for speech or face recognition at all (probably not available in my country) and part of the audio calibration constantly failed and I had to skip over it though.
The games however left me with mixed feelings.
The first game we played (and my most anticipated title) was Kinect Sports, as it is the most successful title so far and most people say it's the best. Maybe I was influenced by this and had too high expectations, because I was rather disappointed and thought it was the worst of those three games. Lag was very noticeable in Kinect sports, and the whole experience was somewhat unsatisfactory. Table tennis for example felt just like Wii Sports Tennis: With alcohol and friends around, I'm sure you can have fun with both games - but that doesn't change the fact that both are pretty much just waggle controls without deepness; as long as you do any kind of movement, it seemed almost impossible to miss the table. The hurdle race just sucked and bowling felt almost random. The only sport I kinda liked was football - too bad I could only play a single game before my knee hurt soo bad I had to stop... :(
Using no controller was interesting at first, but within minutes the initial excitement over not needing a controller was gone and I started to miss a controller, at least for games like table-tennis or bowling where your arms and hands do all the main work. Football was the only sport in this collection where the Kinect control scheme seemed like an improvement over a 5 years old Wii Remote.
Dance Central was next. Lag seemed to be better than in Kinect Sports, but since we were only blokes and none of us was a big fan of dancing we didn't play it for long. But in the right situation, at a big party with alcohol/drugs and chicks around, I guess people could really have lots of fun with it.
When my friends were gone I also tried Your Shape, and it was actually the game I liked best. It's the perfect example of a game where a controller is completely unnecessary at best and full body motion capture is really useful as it can check you're doing the exercises right etc. I didn't play it for long, but I liked what I saw. If a see a good offer for that game, I might actually buy it.
All in all, Kinect was neither better nor worse than I thought - it turned out to be exactly what I was expecting: a quite expensive input device that (like a microphone, steering wheel, Balance Board, dance mat or plastic guitar) improves the user experience of a limited range of games, but is useless in most other games, at least without an additional controller.
When it comes to games, I still consider it to be pretty much just an expensive EyeToy . The biggest and most obvious difference when compared to the EyeToy is the frequent use of skeleton tracking. Microsoft has really done an impressive job there, dozens of first class software developers spent thousands of hours on that. But in the end that's a pure software thingy - even Microsoft says in one of their ads that the skeleton tracking software they developed is actually the most important innovation about Kinect, not the expensive TOF camera hardware.
Bottom line: Yes, I expect Kinect to take a similar path as the Wii: It's all fun, innovative, interesting etc. at first - but the novelty wears off very soon and people will lose interest in it. Because in the long run, I believe people will only use motion controls where it really improves the experience, where it's really an improvement over alternative control schemes. Unfortunately, there are very few games where this is the case - even in games where motion controls make perfect sense, a motion controller is usually the better choice.
Leg tracking - that's where Kinect can still shine. But in general, I consider PS Move to be better, because it combines the key features of both Wii Remote and Kinect: PS Move is technically capable of doing almost anything the Wii Remote/Wii Motion Plus can, but it can be used in a controller-less, Kinect-like way as well, as for example Kung Fu Hustle demonstrates.
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