...Kinect (XBox 360)

Kinect - XBox 360

Quality:

Usability:

Overall:

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Kinect Sensor (no console) | XBox 360 4GB w/ Kinect | XBox 360 250GB w/ Kinect

This was honestly a hard product to review.

The Kinect is of course Microsoft's attempt to compete with the Wii and Playstation Move systems. And If one were to limit it to that kind of thinking, it could almost be considered a failure. With no buttons to click, your actions are limited solely to what your body can do.

So, it's a good thing we're not going to do that. The Kinect has advantages in gameplay that the Wii and Playstation Move just can't accomplish in their current states.

We'll start with a few of the cons.

Menu navigation is a bit awkward at first, but gets easier with practice. Repeated use of the Kinect ID feature under different lighting conditions and with different clothing on helps considerably.

Which brings up another con. The Kinect doesn't track well initially, it needs to be trained for each person several times using Kinect ID. Once it's been trained enough, however, it's able to track with pretty decent precision.

The Kinect uses quite a bit of floor space. It says it can work with just 6ft of space, but it had trouble in our living room with this much space. I had to move things around until I had about 8ft just to get it working. I would recommend having about 10ft, especially if you want to use any of the fitness games. The problem is, it needs to be able to see your entire face and your feet in-frame at all times to work properly.

And on to the pros!

With the Kinect, I've found that I'm actually interested in my exercise routines now. I get good, immediate feedback on both my current activity as well as my overall progress. I don't have to find and drive to a gym or pay the high monthly fees just for cardio and toning. I still recommend a gym and professional trainer for strength training, because the equipment needed for that takes up considerably more space and is quite a bit more expensive as well.

While the menu systems aren't always very intuitive, game play itself is very natural in most cases. If you want to jump, you jump. If you want to lean, you lean. And so on.

The Kinect Adventures that comes with the Kinect is mediocre, but most of the other mini game packs are fun, especially with friends or family. EA Sports Active 2 and Your Shape are both well made, although each has its own quirks, but they keep things interesting and are designed by people who know fitness.

Surprisingly, considering it's a Microsoft hardware product, the Kinect (and the new XBox 360s [s is for slim I assume, but it's not really slimmer, just smaller]) are extremely well built. They're sturdy and have a solid feel, the Kinect moves smoothly and silently, and the new XBox 360 has a much improved disc drive and cooling system.

All told, I definitely think the Kinect is a worthwhile purchase. It seems a bit gimmicky at first glance, but it works, and that's what really matters.

...Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010)

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010)

Visual:

Custom:

Realism:

Controls:

Overall:

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XBox 360 | PS3 | PC | Wii

Received my pre-order of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) today, and spent the entire morning and afternoon playing. This game lives up to the Need for Speed name and then some.

Although this is another game review, you'll notice that I'm using a different rating system. This is because I believe people look for different things in different game types.

I've been playing the Need for Speed games for a couple generations now, and this is definitely a rival for the most visually stunning, realistic and fastest I've played. The cars and terrain are rendered beautifully in photo-realistic detail with excellent visual effects and physics that match up well to everything that's going on.

The game truly feels fast, and while the ability to play as either the racers or the cops is inherent to the entire Hot Pursuit line, it really shines in this continuation of the series.

My only real complaint is the lack of vehicle customization. I understand it on the cops side, although I believe that could be done as well by allowing various styles to the paint jobs and various undercoats such as the Viper's dark green haze, but even the racers get almost no customization at all, a huge departure from other Need for Speed games. Basically, as a racer each vehicle has a set of factory colors to choose from and that's it. A few of the cars, like the Evo, are even missing a factory color or two.

The gamepad controls are solid, following the configuration of most other racer games and works well. The cars each handle uniquely and that translates into the gamepad feel as well. I really wish I could track down the official XBox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel since I play so many racers, but it seems Microsoft has discontinues it. Other 3rd party wheels have also been discontinued and are extremely difficult to hunt down, but I'd really like the official wheel due to various bugs reported in the 3rd party wheels.

The online Autolog feature is really nice for comparing stats and achievements with friends, as well as challenging them when you don't necessarily have time to be online at the same time. I didn't get to try the live multiplayer racing, so I'll end it here until I can find some more racers to join.

Overall, this game is a winner for racing fans. Both sides, cops and racers, have interesting and fun challenges.

...Vanquish (Xbox 360, Demo)

Vanquish - Demo

Visual:

Story:

Controls:

Overall:

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XBox 360 | PS3

Alright, my first real game review, yay.

So, I downloaded the Demo of the XBox 360 title Vanquish and played through the tutorial and a bit of the game. In many ways the game is impressive, and in others it fell short pretty bad.

The game is visually beautiful, the model and textures look great and flow well together. The effects and sounds also work really well for the game, and the voice acting is reasonable, if a bit cheesy, considering it's just a game. The story starts off in a training room learning about your armor and weapons, which makes for a pretty nice tutorial that lets you get used to things without overwhelming you, and you're free to skip the tutorials and go straight to the game, which is always a plus.

The story itself is well put together, although there's complaints from the pre-release game reviewers that the game is very short; about 4hrs give or take. Personally, I don't mind short games as long as they're re-playability is high or they have good multiplayer. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test either of these with the demo.

The game has a feature that lets you slow down time with a burst of adrenaline. It's kind of corny, and worse, you practically have to rely on it to hit targets at the normal distances the game has enemies at. I'm not sure it would even work during multiplayer because it slows down everything in the game to give you time to aim and make minute adjustments.

The controls for this game are extremely difficult to get used to. They're very non-standard, and the positioning of the buttons doesn't match up well with what you're doing. There's many places where I was struggling to crouch, move, aim and shoot at the same time (a necessity in this game) because of the odd controls. Hopefully the full version of the game will have options for customizing this, or have customization patched in quickly to fix the issue.

Overall, the game is pretty interesting, and if you can get past the bad control scheme and aiming difficulty, it's actually pretty fun. But you'd be just as well served with more popular titles like the Call of Duty or the Halo series.

...Brink

BRINK - Preview

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XBox 360 | PS3 | PC

Back in the day, I used to play a lot of FPS games. We're talking back when the original Doom was top of the line. I played pretty much every game id Software produced at the time.

But something happened starting with Quake 2, and the FPS games just stopped being fun for me. I think this was around the same time that the everyday non-geeks started really getting heavy into gaming. They stuck mainly with the FPS games and didn't spread out into the other styles, and they were good at it. It set new levels of gameplay that I had a hard time keeping up with at the time. But it was more than that, something about the games just weren't fun anymore even playing single player.

So, I spent a decade, give or take, playing other games and while I occasionally touched FPS, they still weren't really there for me yet.

Then came the Tactical FPS. A new style of FPS that focused more on thinking and strategy rather than just running in guns blazing. Battlefield, Call of Duty, Halo (especially Halo 3, ODST and Reach); games that mixed real tactics with a deeper story and helped you feel like you were really involved.

I was slow to join in these, but I did join, and they were fun. They were new and different and I really felt like I was getting better as the tutorials an even the levels themselves taught me new tactics I could use to best the AI and possibly other players.

A lot of this had to do with technological advances in the hardware the games were running on, allowing the game AIs to make more decisions, and allowing the game to support more tactical features without slowing it down.

But lately there's been a bit of a plateau, the games have stopped advancing. They try new things, sure; Vanquish for example is so overloaded with things that, along with it's poor aiming, it's just a monstrosity to even attempt to play. A case of too much, piled on with things that just don't help gameplay and don't make it interesting. The game is beautiful, it has a lot of interesting things, and even a decent storyline, but the controls are just too cumbersome.

In comes Brink, created by the development group Splash Damage.

Being released for PC, XBox 360, and PS3, this game promises to be a complete change from everything FPS has been so far. The game helps relieve a lot of the controls by making choices for you based on how you're moving and where. It will jump over things, climb walls, slide under things all automatically just by you looking at them while you move and press a single action button (at least that's how their videos make it sound). This frees up the rest of the controls for moving, aiming, and primary and secondary weapons, a very modest set used in many other successful titles.

The technology behind it all is called Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain or "SMART", most likely a backronym but fitting if it does everything they claim. SMART is the decision engine behind determining what to do based on your speed, location and obstacles. Impressive technology from everything Splash Damage is claiming.

But it's not the only tech joining Brink. Detailed motion capture is being used to help the game feels more real, along with a whole slew of weapon and other sound bites specially recorded just to give the game authenticity. Even their visual style is new, combining photorealism with exaggerated proportions that make it easy to make out fine details during fast paced action, while at the same time being almost lifelike.

One of the other new tech pieces is the blending of singleplayer and multiplayer allowing players to progress their character offline as well as online. This is combined with a mission system that changes and takes different directions for every character, allowing a truly unique experience for everyone that plays.

Since the game isn't out yet (due Q1 2011) I don't know if it will be everything they claim, but what I've seen so far is pretty impressive, and I certainly look forward to receiving my copy.