Posts Tagged ‘kinect sports

15
Aug
11

Ex-Box

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
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sad-panda2Last night, after two glorious months of coming home every night to a shiny black Xbox Kinect, I finally had to pack my new best friend up so he can be shipped off to his new home.

Opening up his box to pack him away brought all the memories we’ve shared over the last two months flooding back.

The moment when we first unpacked him and plugged him in and his little Kinect sensor nodded slowly up and down, trying to find me like a baby bird so that I could regurgitate some food into his little mouth.

The day when I invited all my buddies around to play Kinect Sports and the neighbours downstairs threatened to call the police because we have wooden floors and all the 100m sprinting, javelining, hurdling and long jumping was making bits of plaster rain down on them like a summer thundershower.

 

 

And who could forget the time when I figured out how to connect to Xbox Live using a 3G modem? Right before my eyes, the young eaglet I had nursed took flight for the first time only to nose-dive into a rock moments later when I tried to get the Kinect pics off the &^*@#!% thing and failed miserably (my fault for being a dumbass).

Then there was the night we downloaded Limbo. That deserves a post in itself, seriously. That game ROCKS – if you’re connected to Xbox Live, I’d highly recommend buying Limbo, especially if you’re a fan of old school platform games with incredible gameplay and a dark, melancholy ambience that is hauntingly memorable.

 

 

But of course the cherry on the cake was Fable III which turned out to be awesome despite the fact that I thought it was utter crap the first time I played (J-Rab and I opted to try out 2 player mode which is awesome! For player 1. All player 2 really does is run around being useless for at least the first hour of gameplay, which was all it took to put J-Rab off it for life).

I never got to finish Fable III, but last night I played it in my dreams a bit. You guys were all there! You were all my subjects and I was raising the taxes and making your children work in my factories and then fathering a whole lot of basterd offspring of my own with whores (seriously, you can do everything mentioned in that last sentence. Such a fucking cool game).

 

 

It’s still here, right next to me as I write this. I was even sent an extra controller, which I carefully packed away last night, but just as I was picking it up to put it on the table in the entrance hall so I wouldn’t forget it, I pressed the Xbox button and the green light started flashing in the darkness, calling out to an Xbox that was already shut down and boxed away.

Calling out, “Kaaa! Kaaaaa!” to no one.

No one.

 

 

BUT, there is hope! I saved my gamer profile so I can just ram it into someone else’s Xbox and finally finish Fable III! Now all I got to find is someone kind enough to lend me theirs…

Or I could just man up and finally buy one for myself. Not quite sure how I’ll ever be able to afford one, but if I put a little away every month, I should have enough saved by about April next year.

Anyone know any great deals on Xboxes?

-ST

26
May
11

SlickTiger Rocks The Xbox Kinect (week2)

By SlickTiger 2 Comments
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Today is exactly two weeks since I hooked up my Xbox review unit with the Kinect sensor and started jamming the three games that came with it (Kinect Adventures, Dance Central and Kinect Sports) and to be perfectly honest, the novelty is starting to wear off.

In the beginning I raced home to fire up the Xbox and get my game on, anxious to get stuck into a mean 100m sprint in Kinect Sports or unlock the next difficulty level in Kinect Adventures, and lemme tell you, you can work up a mean sweat playing those games, its a far more intense gaming experience that the Wii is but that’s exactly the problem.

 

 

I got over all the effort involved. Sometimes you just want to sit on your ass and mash a controller like there’s no tomorrow. All the running / jumping / ducking / throwing / retarded dancing just gets a bit much.

When coming home from work I’d think to myself Ok, I could spend the next few hours exerting a lot of energy I don’t have right now playing Kinect games OR I could sprawl on the couch, drink a beer and do fuck-all… Tricky one…

Either that, or if I did have the energy, I’d just go to gym, klap some cardio and weights and leave feeling like I’d actually had a solid workout.

The Kinect games I’ve been playing require just enough effort to be tiresome when you’re not in the mood, but when you are in the mood, playing them doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re getting stronger or fitter in any way, which kinda begs the question, what market are they aiming for here?

The ‘casual gamer’ was a term that started getting some mainstream coverage when the Wii first landed, because that’s who Nintendo defined their target market as. In other words, regular folk who don’t game until their eyes bleed but wouldn’t mind a spot of Wii tennis with some friends if their picnic / social badminton league got cancelled.

 

 

Nintendo got it right because Wiis were priced lower that Xboxes or PS3s and so casual gamers thought ‘Why not? Sounds like a lark!’

But would they do the same for an Xbox / Kinect system that’s priced R2 700 more than a Wii? (According to www.take2.co.za where a new Wii is R1 599 and a new Xbox with 250Gb hard drive and Kinect sensor is R4 299)

Yeah, don’t hold your breath on that one. If you’re going to fork out that kind of money for a console, you’re probably a serious gamer and no serious gamer is going to jump around like a fairy playing Kinect games when there’s the promise of serious violence, bloodshed and murder to be had in games like Gears Of War or Call Of Duty.

Sure, it represents a major break-through in controller-less gaming, but what was so bad about controllers anyway? It’s a noble effort to get gamers off the couch and doing something healthy for a change, but let’s be honest – those fat bastards aren’t going anywhere.

 

 

Oh, and one last thing. Remember when I said that the Kinect takes pictures of you while you game? Yeah, well good luck getting your hands on them! I tried to track mine down so I could post a few to liven up this review, but was told by the kind folks that lent me the Xbox to review that the only way to do that was by connecting your Xbox to the internet and visiting https://kinectshare.com/.

I asked if I could connect using a 3G card and was told that you can, but you have to plug your Xbox into your PC via an Ethernet cable, configure a whole bunch of settings, plug your 3G modem into the PC, connect the normal way and then test the connection on the Xbox.

Obviously none of this worked, but I used my brain to figure out the glitches and an hour later actually got the Xbox to connect via the 3G modem plugged into my laptop.

Then I had to wait for another 30 mins while the Xbox downloaded 100MB of updates, after which I went through the whole mission of setting up an Xbox Live account and FINALLY when that was done, I was ready to get the pics off https://kinectshare.com/ using the… Xbox… internet… um…?

 

 

Great. So what the fuck am I looking for here? Internet Explorer? How exactly do I get to the site https://kinectshare.com/ using an Xbox? I asked Google and it told me to download some kind of fucking third party browser that only works if your machine’s been chipped which was a fat lot of fucking good.

Some other forum I read said you can use the Windows Media Centre feature on the Xbox to browse the internet, so I tried that too and 30 minutes later, after jumping through God-knows-how-many hoops to get my Xbox talking to my PC so I could configure the media centre I get a fucking message that’s so awesome you can’t even take a screen grab of it (they all turned out black) that basically says:

Go fuck yourself.

 

 

It’s now nearly twelve o’clock at night. I’ve been trying to get those fucking pics of me dancing around like a poof off the Kinect for the last four hours and truth be told, I no longer give a shit.

For my last week with the Xbox, I’m begging, borrowing and stealing games from my buddies where I get to sit on the couch and KILL THINGS. I’ll leave all the girly dancing up to the girls I work with when I bring the Kinect in to work tomorrow for a ‘games evening’ we’ve arranged after work.

And this time around you bet your ass I’ll be taking the pics with my trusty N8 rather than have to rely on the imaginary ones the Kinect may or may not have been taking.

-ST

19
May
11

Slicktiger Rocks The Xbox Kinect (week 1)

By SlickTiger 1 Comment
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So as many of you who follow me on Twitter probably know from the pic I posted last week, I’ve recently gotten my hands on the Xbox Kinect system for a three week review, along with three games, Kinect Sports, Kinect Adventures and Dance Central.

 

 

I took the review unit I received home last week and connected it up to my TV / stereo system in no time. It’s dead easy to hook up and connecting the Kinect sensor is as easy as plugging a wire into your Xbox and positioning the sensor in a spot near the TV where it can clearly see you (I put it on the tv itself. We’re rocking an old-school CRT TV monitor because, well, it was a hand-me-down from a late gran and we can’t afford anything else).

Here’s where things get freaky. Soon as the sensor is plugged in and fired up, it actively starts looking for you. It moves its little sensor-head (that kinda looks like Johnny 5’s head from the film Short Circuit) up and down until it has a lock on not only your body, but also exactly where it is positioned in relation to the sensor.

 

 

In layman’s terms, this means the Kinect not only tracks your movements from left to right, but also tracks your movement towards and away from the sensor (your depth, in other words).

I fired up Kinect Sports first and eagerly performed my stretches while the game started.

Fair warning at this point (courtesy of @HollieHepburn), put some clothes on. As much as you, like me, might look forward to nothing more at the end of your day than coming home, stripping down and getting to work on a bottle of fine scotch, just keep in mind that the Xbox takes pics of you while you game.

You can choose to share these pics or keep them private, but either way, they are stored on the device somewhere, and much like that porn video you shot for the fun of it one drunken night with your girlfriend at the time, they could get you in trouble…

 

 

We then proceeded to spend the next three hours, totally immersed in Kinect Sports, where we took part in everything from long jump to ping pong, using just our bodies and were both amazed at how responsive and accurate the sensor is.

Running on the spot makes your character sprint around a track, making a throwing gesture over your head launches a javelin, kicking makes him pass a soccer ball, a straight bowling gesture makes him bowl a straight ball while a curved one puts some spin on it – that’s some next level shit right there!

 

 

Needless to say, our first experience of the Xbox Kinect system was a lot of fun and the first thing we thought to do was call up all our friends and invite them around to play as well.

The Kinect is definitely more fun when you play with at least another two or three people. As a solo gamer it would probably feel a little lonely gaming by yourself, but hey, you can always take all your clothes off to make it interesting Winking smile

Stay tuned for more write-ups as I get more into the Xbox Kinect system and keep a special eye out for the Dance Central episode, which promises to be packed full of pictures of me and J-Rab shakin’ it like ritards on the living room dancefloor.

Good times.

-ST