Sure, I'll stop with the snark when you stop with the massive hyperbole.
I'm only sharing my actual opinions. They might seem like hyperbole to you, but they are exactly down to the letter what I believe.
If you can't see any potential uses for Kinect then it's more do due with a lack of creativity on your part and less do with the technology itself. If all you want to do is play games designed for controller then that's fine, but to say Kinect is useless for gaming, especially a massively improved version, is at best shortsighted and at worst simply self-serving.
I want to play games designed with the best controls in mind, that's correct. if the controls break down, the game will always be shit. Not sure why this is controversial, and it has NOTHING to do with creativity.
As for my comment about the audio capabilities, there is a lot of extremely sophisticated tech inside there for dealing with ambient noise issues. For one thing Kinect use it's camera to track your mouth movements. So if you're talking it can focus on listening to what you're saying and ignore other audio sources. This is demonstrated in one of the game where you can animate a character with your movements and voice and it works for 2 people at the same time. So while I was animating my character and giving it speech my girlfriend was doing the same it knew who was talking and therefore which character to apply it to. The next generation of Kinect will apparently be precise enough to
read lips.
It also analyzes audio coming from the 360 itself and can filter it out. This is why it can still hear and understand you with music playing very loudly.
One of the other things I've often done is communicate with the Xbox from across or even outside the room. You expect people to do that with a headset?
Lastly, as derFeef said, the voice API is build into Kinect and just needs to be accessed by the developers without creating their own voice recognition system or licensing another one.
I knew about a lot of this, but it doesn't really change what I said because my Kinect still occasionally makes mistakes or gets interrupted by sounds. I'm sure others Kinect does too, because I've read stories about it.
Sure, it's better than what we have before, but again the headset is the most guaranteed way to ensure the problem doesn't exist. But even if it wasn't, your original query seemed to be suggesting there is something wrong with wearing a headset. I was simply saying that we already have a headset on Xbox, we should basically use that instead of MS wasting money on tech that doesn't work adequately at all for most games (not the voice, but the motion controller-free shit). Since this has never been a problem for me, I didn't understand why you were saying it like there's some rush to be free of headsets for me (or most people).
I'm well aware that you've owned a Kinect, I remember the threads when you got it, and you were so dead set against appreciating any aspect of it that there was never a chance you would find anything good in the tech.
You have so little faith in my ability not to be five years old. I normally don't change my viewpoint on things because I am intimately familiar with my own beliefs and likes/dislikes. So it's extremely difficult for something to come out and have me read my own perspectives incorrectly. But it does happen. I changed my opinion with Saint's Row, for example. More recently, I was extremely outspoken in my criticisms of Journey from what I played on the demo... and the final game blew me away. And I admitted it and wrote up a huge post on why this is. Nay, the reason I don't like Kinect is because it fucking sucks - not because I had made up my mind.
I knew Kinect was going to be bad prior to launch because I tried it out prior to launch at NYCC and it was a fucking disaster. But, if it ended up being good, I would have said so.
Instead, it's a acid-bath apocalyptic cesspool of horrible games, awful controls and what's more, this will never change: games are inherently limited once you remove tactile feedback, the efficiency, reliability, etc. The list goes on and on.
You act as if I'm drawing a conclusion that is simply beyond reality. But the truth is anyone who knows Kinect tech realizes that you literally cut the number of relevant genres that actually work on the thing by well over 90%. The rest is conjecture: you can say there's AMAZING things coming that people have to think up that would only uniquely work on Kinect, and
I will keep saying "Show Me the Money." Until such point when Kinect "showstoppers" end being just party games/mini-games that I will never give a shit about because
I don't want to play shallow garbageware, I will continue being skeptical. Even Child of Eden was held back by the tech, and that's probably the least offensive game on the Kinect list!
