The holiday season has descended into its dark, twilight hours. The hot-ticket items have gone back to sleep in storage, and bottom-bin sales fill stores with the unwanted dregs of the free market. Last year in the technology industry, no items reigned more supreme than the Microsoft Kinect.
As of Jan. 5, Microsoft shipped 8 million units of the device within the first 60 days of its release, and Xboxes are likely to be in short supply during January and February as the system rides off the Kinect’s coattails.
R. U. Game?, 5186 SW 34th St. in Gainesville, was sold out of the Kinect just days after its release, said store manager Jared Nash.
“Before we even had them in stock, every other day, people would call asking for them,” Nash said.
Much like when the Wii first dropped the warhead of change on the industry and sold like Wayfarers at a hipster convention, the Kinect is being embraced by mainstream culture more so than by hardcore gamers.
And the device’s first wave of games are very similar to the Wii’s — almost to the point of being circumspect. For example, “Kinect Sports” performs the exact same function as “Wii Sports,” but with the absence of a controller.
“Every thing I’ve seen about it is similar to how the Wii was,” Nash said.
While taking that into consideration, the two devices still couldn’t be more different.
Simple waves of the hand turn the Xbox Dashboard into a scene from “Minority Report,” and the ability to pause a video just by saying “pause” gives the player the sense that he or she is in the future. Motion-tracking in “Kinect Sports” is close to a 1-1 ratio, which makes boxing and table tennis a lot of fun, but the soccer game is fairly basic and, at times, odd. In fact, playing a demo of the game at Best Buy left me with an unpleasant crick in my knee from kicking the ball too hard.
UF criminology and Spanish senior Rachael Dunn received a Kinect for Christmas after seeing it in commercials and gushing to friends and family about how cool it looked, particularly the game “Dance Central.” Before she got the Kinect, she only played video games every now and then, most of the time “Call of Duty.”
“[The Kinect] looked cool, and I wanted to learn how to dance, I guess,” Dunn said. “I’ve only played it a couple of times so far, but when I do, I play for hours.”
Without a doubt, “Dance Central” makes the most out of the Kinect’s technology, tracking players’ body movements to an almost exact degree. The built-in camera also adds something special, recording the player at his or her most embarrassing moments — something that can provide plenty of laughs, as no player’s dignity is safe.
Sliding to “Brick House” and doing the cabbage patch to “Bust a Move” is similar to “Rock Band,” yet the lack of a controller makes immersion for the player all the greater. Sometimes, the game makes “Dance Dance Revolution” look like “Pong.”
And like the Wii, the Kinect can be used not only for fun and games, but also for a good workout.
“It’s an awesome alternative to the gym,” Dunn said.
However, she said, the staying power of the system is questionable.
“If new games don’t come out soon, it will get old,” Dunn said.
Nash agreed, explaining he just couldn’t play a game like “Call of Duty” without a controller.
“It’s hard to tell how a full game would work on it,” Nash said, a problem the Wii, Kinect’s predecessor, maintains to this day.
