Match the hype

I don't think MS cares too much about the controllerless aspects of Natal outside of their marketing.  They are basically handing Natal to developers and telling them to do with it what you will.  Kudo has stated a couple time I believe about the possibilities of the Natal controller hybrid.

As far as feedback, sound and visuals are enough.  People playing on PC with mouse and keyboard don't have rumble, and they seem to do alright.

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.

I think looking at some of the footage of people playing Burnout that the fact they had no controller felt more immersive. I am not averse to feedback but neither do I feel I miss it when its turned off. Funny thing about feedback is it often over compensates.

Having said that using the burnout scenario I see no reason why people wanting a touchy feely moment cannot pick up a dinner plate and for the particularly touchy feely types they could pick up a peripheral of the plate with feedback capabilities.

In an ideal world I wold have the rig that we saw for FM3 in E3 but life is all about comprimise and in the case of the rig your bank balance.

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.

That part I like.  Funnily enough, what I'd most like to see on Natal is a Myst style adventure game.  I think that would be very interesting in Natal.  You could pick up things, turn them to investiage them, move though a 3D world, etc.  - the 'Milo & Kate' prototype made me feel Natal would be marvelous for that kind of stuff.

The legs, etc. is great but that's where my concern for space & practically comes from.  I know my living room currently is not setup for lots of jumping and leaping.  It has the space, but too many expensive items scattered around.  The full body would be great for Wii Fit type stuff I reckon, provided you have the room.

When I bought my Wii, I was under the impression that it would be, oh I don't know.... accurate with it's motion controls?  But it's not, it's like trying to paint with a mop.  And after the pretty decent controls that Wii sports does have, all the other Wii games have been fairly lacking in either technology or creativity.  What I mean is that most games have been reduced to waggle as a form of control.  Even good games like Super Mario Galaxy, besides the star collection there's nothing in that game that couldn't have been done with a gamecube controller.

So in my opinion, accuracy and creativity will be the litmus test for Natal.  If it can't detect subtle motions, or developers are unable to come up with interesting ways to use Natal, it's bound to fail.  I'm still curious how they're going to implement Natal with things that require character movement, like an FPS without having any tactile controller.

Room space would be a massive concern for using Natal for 1:1 space mapping.  If the software was good enough, I would make changes for my play time.  But it would be a pain to clear out an area everytime you wanted to play.

But the idea of having a 1:1 mapping between real space and game space is a VERY intriguing one for me.  Developers would have to think long and hard about people's real world living situations before devoting an entire game to this idea though.

i'm probably one of the most critical people on this site as far as natal goes. ...but lag/accuracy issues, price, and competition can all be overcome as long as natal has one critical thing: a killer app that really captures the interest of the public. so far i haven't seen one but MS still has quite a lot of time to announce one.

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