Forgot I even owned it.Follow

Fighting game coming up for it. I believe orthopedic surgeons funded the game development, though.

There are a lot of PC based uses for it, you may want to research them.

Useless info: The Kinect has sold more units than the PS3 Move.

MS duped ten million people into spending one hundred fifty dollars on a couple of cheap cameras with some decent motion detection software. They already have your money, why would they bother with the silly thing now?

Edited, Apr 19th 2011 8:05pm by Turin

I can. In fact I have a lot of hopes and dreams for the Kinect, which is the only reason I didnt return it when I got it for Christmas. However, I'm sure nobody will actually make the games i want them to.

Three Stooges Simulator

I just don't get how you are supposed to move. It's a game that's entirely tracked that doesn't sound fun to me, and I don't want to walk/run in place...

I can see rts games, though. Of course, I don't see why I would want to play them with Kinect. Using a mouse and keyboard sounds way better to me...

That's a pretty poor argument, because the complaint about the kinect is radically different from the one about controllers/shooters.

The only reason some players prefer shooters on the PC is because they can aim accurately faster. That's realistically the only major bonus.

But it actually isn't a bonus at all, when you consider the actual game balance, because the games are designed to run at the appropriate speed for both console and PC. It just comes down to player types at this point.

The kinects issues are totally different. We aren't talking about things going slower (which, to be fair, they will on a console with kinect), we are talking about how you are even supposed to make it work in the first place in a way that doesn't detract from the experience. That's the real issue. Console shooters don't have to face any major changes. Even if they were balanced totally around pc gaming, the experience drop on the console wouldn't be drastic. Everything still works the same way--you feel like you are playing the same game.

That's just not going to be the case for Kinect and RTS games, because of two things.

1. Accuracy and speed. This is the same for shooters/controllers, granted, but the problem is much larger. Think about selecting a group of units with kinect. Probably pretty easy, right? At the very least, it wouldn't be that much harder than with a mouse. Now consider selecting an individual unit. Not so easy. But this is actually still the minor problem.

2. Consider the normal rts layout. The majority of your screen is the game field, the top is generally your resources and the bottom is your minimap, unit info and command list. The last part is what worries me.

Even though the kinect is, in many cases, alarmingly accurate, the game as a whole would definitely suffer if the command buttons were as small as they generally are on pc games. Even worse, pc gamers never even deal with navigating command lists, because they learn the hotkeys. That's a pretty huge reduction in game speed right there, far beyond the controller issue.

Now consider that, in order to solve the command problem (without sacrificing control options), you'd probably need to replace the normal command HUD with a menu button instead, which would lead to that units options appearing large on screen, instead of the game field (or at least, hovering in front of it).

That's a whole extra step required. And imagine if you misclick? Fixing that on the pc is fast--it would be far slower on the kinect.

We aren't talking about a small reduction in game speed. We're talking about a pretty large one.

The problem isn't that you can't aim accurately, it's that it takes more time to aim accurately. There's nothing about a joystick that makes it impossible to aim.

Edited, Apr 20th 2011 10:51pm by idiggory

I fail to see how this is addressing my point that the argument isn't the same for the Kinect as it is for a controller, or is that not what you are trying to say?

Do console shooters require aim assist? Yes. But the overall experience of the game doesn't really change from PC to console.

The controller limitations are easily fixed via coding so that the quality of the game doesn't fall. My argument is that an RTS game for Kinect suffers from a different sort of limitations that can't be fixed in this manner.

Eske: you can use the thumbstick, but they still have to code against the d-pad being used because it's the least effective option.

idig: I was simply clarifying the history and main reason for the difference between KB+M and console controls. It can partially tie into the point in the fact that it does actually change how the game works on a base level. It introduces a mechanically (digitally) assisted skill cap. You don't have to get as pixel perfect in console shooters as in PC shooters as far as aiming is concerned which makes getting kills easier.

It's a very hotly debated topic in RTSs among what might be considered the "top tier" of professionals. SC2's release highlighted a lot of it in the arguments over the self-optimizing mineral gathering AI and SC1's old scheme of not having workers interested in optimizing themselves at all. A minor point in the grand design but when a match comes down to the cascade of one guy having gotten 7 minerals 1 frame faster than the other guy it's valid.

RTS is likely the only game that can make good use of Kinect as it could just detect hand movements as opposed to literally kneeing or kicking or punching an opponent (for fighters) or holding your hands out at a monitor for 10-15 minute clips aiming at stuff and pretending to pull triggers. I'm sure someone (perhaps not Blizzard's April fools "minority report" joke) will come up with a control scheme that is acceptable enough to play an RTS without causing physical exhaustion, but the game will likely be changed to accommodate it. And we're back in the boat of theoretically same but functionally different.

It was a bit funny the other day as I played a flash game who's creator chose an x-box-like controller for his logo with a phrase along the lines of "the next person to tell me a mouse is better than a controller gets hit".