It was a lazy sunday afternoon, we'd done all the cleaning, wolfed scones for lunch and started digging around in the "Cupboard of Doom" to extricate the Xbox 360 and Kinect from their wiry graves for a bit of activity and a giggle.
The last time my daughter messed around with Kinect was when she was knee high to a grasshopper so I thought it would be entertaining to revisit the whole kit and caboodle now she was older, wiser and a lot more game savvy.
First off I was surprised to find that despite being rammed in a cupboard all these years, the Kinect was still working and still felt like a nicely robust piece of kit. The Xbox 360 (not my original one but a replacement "Arcade" model that I picked up when my first Xbox 360 met the red ring of death) by contrast really does sound like it's feeling its age (like me!) and makes a pretty horrendous amount of noise during normal operation (the console du jour, the PS4 isn't much quieter tbh! Oh for solid state PS5s with quieter optical drives!)
Back when I first got Kinect I also got a bunch of promotional games from a previous reviewing gig. So we went through them all in turn, starting with the "Killer App" for Kinect - Dance Central
There's a lot to like about this, from the neat way the game uses Kinect to control the UI almost flawlessly, to the fact that it really did have one heck of a killer selection of songs straight out of the box, most of which we still recognised (Lady Gaga FTW!)
(Not So) Little Miss got straight to work "schooling" her dad in how to move with fluidity and style rather than lumbering around the "Dance Floor" (Living room) like Bernard Bresslaw in a pair of Frankenstein boots. The sensor and game worked really well together, and I still think tis is probably the only worthy thing about Kinect.
Then of course, with my daughter being completely and totally in love with Cats, it had to be this one next...
Kinectimals, developed by Frontier (Elite) Developments, rammed to the gills with feline cuteness. A fairly successful attempt to bring virtual pets kicking, biting, scratching and squeaking into the realms of hands-free control. Some bits of this work beautifully (and it's still quite a stunning looking game despite running on the 360) and some don't work at all, though back when motion control was hugely experimental, it still felt quite magical to teach a virtual panther some neat tricks.
Then things started to go properly downhill...
Imagine for a tiny moment if someone managed to marry gestural controls with the thrill of swinging a lightsaber around in a Star Wars game. Now imagine if someone managed to poop all over that dream, producing a game that had Pod Racing that featured races you could win just by standing there and folding your arms, and worse - Lando and Han in a dance-off with imperial storm troopers in a gesture-controlled dancing game (the majority of gestures being too rude to describe in a mere blog).
"Kinect Star Wars" is, was and always will be awful. If I'd paid good money for it, I'd be furious. Actually, what the heck am I on about, I paid for Kinect in the first place, so who's the fool?
From there we rode the bobsled of godawfulness even more rapidly down the icy slope taking a look at Disneyland Adventures, Let's Cheer (look, I told you, we got sent these as review copies, what makes you think I'd consciously buy a game featuring nubile virtual cheerleaders, you weirdo!), Your Shape: Fitness Evolved and "Biggest Loser" (an adequate description of how it must've felt to purchase a Kinect fitness title, and expect it to work on your acres of cake-fed ass).
Sadly our retrospective came to an end, it was dinner time and we had to pack up the console, the kinect, and the snakey mess of wiring to clear things away. But next weekend we're planning to do the same (probably with hilarious results) with the Playstation VR so tune in, if you can bear it. for more modern and not-so-modern retrospective goodness!
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