At least there’s no tomato throwing

If you know what I’m talking about, stop reading now, this post will probably be more of what you already know.

For those that don’t, let me introduce you to Peter Molyneux. Known by some to be the face of seriously crazy in the game industry, this guy comes up with ridiculous ideas. This includes using the Kinect to throw tomatoes and create statues in Fable 3.

Anyways, yesterday was November 4th, the official launch date of the Kinect, the newest “revolutionary” device by Microsoft. So naturally, I went down to Gamestop to pick it up along with Dance Central, Fable 3, and Rock Band 3. I came home and was quite confused on where to start. Three awesome games that I cannot physically play at the same time. I had played Dance Central at PAX, I heard Fable 3 had some bugs, and Rock Band 3’s Fender Strat is not out yet, so I didn’t have a real burning excitement to play any one of them. I decided on Dance Central to really put the Kinect to the test.

A lot of people think the Kinect is super lame, only for casual gamers, and nobody’s going to buy it and this includes Myles. He’s been making fun of me since the day I preordered it, but when he came home yesterday and I was in between songs, I made him try out the menu screen. Put your arm out, move it up and down and pick an option. Flick your hand and you’ve selected it. He was quite impressed. And then I took him to the dashboard. Wave at it and it’ll bring you to the Kinect dashboard. Say “Xbox close tray” and your open disk tray will close. (I feel like I’m commanding my robot R2D2, “Hey R2!” *beep beep beep* “Dance program” *dances*) Having thoroughly impressed Myles and making him feel like we’re in the future, I continued to dance until I was thoroughly out of breath.

Overall, I’m quite impressed. Dance Central feels like Guitar Hero 1 again: Harmonix just stepping into something entirely new and testing the waters, so it’s not super polished or full of features, but it gets the job done and it’s fun. It still needs a bunch of updates (like commands to shut down the console and other things to make it run more smoothly), but it’s not broken and it’s a very good piece of launch hardware. Kinect will never replace a controller and it may not be for hardcore gamers, but it’s at least something to marvel at and have a bit of fun with once in a while.

Side note: despite having no controllers, nothing to hold, someone has already managed to break their TV using it.