After a year and a half of hype, speculation, and one big name change, Microsoft's motion-control sensor has finally arrived. Thanks to its lofty promise of true controller-free gaming, analysts expect Kinect to be a pretty big hit this holiday season as it goes head-to-head with competing controllers from Sony and Nintendo.
But forget the projections -- we've had our hands on (or is that off?) a Kinect and a collection of launch titles for a few days now. While it's certainly wowed us with its sci-fi tech, you might not want to ditch your old gamepads just yet. Read on to find out why.
The Basics
Kinect is a motion-sensing camera for the Xbox 360 that lets you play games, navigate menus and control media using gestures and voice commands. No conventional game controller is needed.
Price: A standalone Kinect unit costs $150. The sensor also comes bundled with a 250 GB Xbox 360 Slim for $400 or a 4 GB model for only $300. Every Kinect comes with a copy of the game Kinect Adventures.
Set up: To use Kinect, you'll need an Xbox 360 (any model will do) and a good amount of space (much more on that later). That's just the bare minimum, though. To really use the camera the way it was intended, you'll also want an Xbox Live account so that you can access cool features like videoconferencing and live, streaming sports via ESPN.
If you happen to own an Xbox Slim, set up couldn't be easier: just plug the camera's orange-shaded plug into the like-colored AUX outlet located in the back of your console. If you have an older model, there's an extra step: you'll need to plug in the USB/power cable into the USB port located on the back of the unit, then plug in the attached AC adapter into a wall outlet. Pop in a game, run through a few simple initial calibration steps, and you're ready to Kinect.
Does it work as advertised?
We're betting you have a billion questions about the sensor's capabilities. Here are a few answers.
At the moment, no. From your main 360 guide, you can wave your hand or say "Xbox, Kinect" to 'activate' Kinect, which also automatically takes you to the Kinect Hub, a sort of mini-menu dedicated to Kinect-ready applications. From here you can launch movies or music from Zune, watch sporting events on ESPN, start up a video chat with Video Kinect, sift through your friends list and, of course, tweak Kinect settings.
But you can't actually control the main Xbox 360 guide using Kinect. You can't wave your hand to cycle through the games marketplace or power your system on and off by yelling at it. It's all constrained to the Kinect Hub, and while that does indeed work, it's not exactly what we were expecting.
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