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[Amir0x]

I guess I should have added for me personally. I don't function well when under the influence, particularly in reflex speed. Nor does my mind allow me to go beyond a single track.

Yeah but when you're intoxicated one does not need to do well. It stops mattering how well one does when you're fucked up, I find lol

 

[mujun]

I see the article has been exposed for what it is lol

A previewer filled with excitement, right!

 

[bender]

Yeah but when you're intoxicated one does not need to do well. It stops mattering how well one does when you're fucked up, I find lol

This is true. I'm still going to miss having an avatar on screen. I need to stop being so negative about this game.

 

[v0yce]

Read the thread, your not really following the context of the discussion, I dont think he is saying the experience cant be different, the complaints here about more about the hyperbole and the bad writing than the game. The article is piss poor. Pointing out that using Kinect instead of a controller isnt going to turn this into some kind of out of body experience is more of a jab at the writing in the article, not some statement that how the game is controlled cant change the 'feeling' of playing it.

Hmm, well I also find it really telling that many of those so put off by the hyperbole in the article (very understandable) are the same ones throwing around the "flailing about like star wars kids" nonsense.

Guess its kind of hard to take either seriously.

 

[Calcaneus]

Everybody wants to be the first to declare something a masterpiece or a piece of garbage.

 

[justin.au]

Worse than the guy that was arguing Portal 2 was better than perfect.

 

[Sohter.Nura]

That's kinda the reason why I don't read gaming news - these people trip so much on their writing. What is he going to do next? Rip off his shirt and roll on the ground naked?

 

[Lord Error]

Makes me excited to play it with move, which they hopefully will implement. Not a big fan of flailing too much around the TV since the eyetoy days, but I can see how motion aiming will work well for this game. His comparison is highly flawed though. For a game like this, the chance is you are going to feel the greatest impact on your first playthrough, regardless of how you play it. Everything after will be a repeat which won't leave you quite as impressed.

What the author is talking about is exactly why a technology like Kinect is extremely interesting to me as a gaming device. One of the things a hands free interface does is remove the barrier between yourself and the game.

Would you want a hands free interface for driving your car? One where you hold an invisible wheel and push an invisible brake? I think we both know the answer, and this is why the whole thing with 'barrier' is such a flawed thing to bring up. This kind of control just creates different, and in many was bigger barrier. The real removal of barrier that you're talking about would be when your complex thoughts could be translated to game actions.

 

[Thagomizer]

That article was hilarious to read.

 

[Amir0x]

What is he going to do next? Rip off his shirt and roll on the ground naked?

If he is rolling on Ecstasy this is entirely possible.

 

[StudioTan]

Would you want a hands free interface for driving your car? One where you hold an invisible wheel and push an invisible brake? I think we both know the answer, and this is why the whole thing with 'barrier' is such a flawed thing to bring up. This kind of control just creates different, and in many was bigger barrier. The real removal of barrier that you're talking about would be when your complex thoughts could be translated to game actions.

I think that's the wrong way to look at it, driving is a tactile experience by design, well by current design. A better question is would you forsake the wheel for driving the car with a controller? Considering how many people laugh at playing racers with a controller vs a wheel I think many people would say no.

When you drive the turning of the wheel has a direct correlation with how the car moves yet on a controller you're translating the turning of your hands to side to side motions on a thumbstick. It's not about whether no hands is better than a controller, it's what is going to give you the best experience. That was why I used the example of a face to face conversation vs webcam instead of a physical activity where you are touching something.

The creator of the game said he wanted the game to feel like you were "conducting" what was happening on screen. I could totally see how this is one experience where Kinect really WILL enhance it to a large degree. I can also totally see how this can make you feel more immersed in the game as well.

And to those who were talking about lag, if you're watched any of the videos from PAX and GDC you can tell that the controls are much much crisper than they were at TGS and what we saw with the 1st gen Kinect games.

 

[Neuromancer]

Miz's presentation at E3 last year

I just want people to remember how awesome this was. Let's not get carried away by one preview, this game looks awesome on Kinect.

 

[Wallach]

If he is rolling on Ecstasy this is entirely possible.

I'd probably skip the fucking game altogether and move directly to this step at that point.

 

[Wario64]

Miz's presentation at E3 last year

I just want people to remember how awesome this was. Let's not get carried away one preview, this game looks awesome on Kinect.

Is the Kinect placed behind him?

 

[Neuromancer]

Is the Kinect placed behind him?

Yes, directly behind his buttocks apparently.

 

[killertofu]

I'm going to do shrooms with my girlfriend and attempt to play this. Can't wait.

 

[Salsa]

this is hilarious

second coming of christ confirmed

 

[Raoh]

You wave your hand over a group of enemies, destroy them with a very "Force Push"-like move and then eliminate some enemy fire

So this works similar to the Gunslinger demo I've seen? You hover your hand, it locks the targets your hand waves over then push your hand forward to shoot the missiles.

Do I have that right?

 

[SmokyDave]

With a controller, Child of Eden is a video game.

Sold. Forgive my lack of enthusiasm for flailing in front of my TV whilst crying.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

this is hilarious

second coming of christ confirmed

The Witcher already came son

Spoiler

ZING

Sold. Forgive my lack of enthusiasm for flailing in front of my TV whilst crying.

lol good God

 

[Beer Monkey]

Having played the first level of CoE with Kinect at PAX East, I can honestly say there's no way I'd want to play it with a controller.

 

[Kafel]

Having played the first level of CoE with Kinect at PAX East, I can honestly say there's no way I'd want to play it with a controller.

shh

 

[Zeouterlimits]

Asked in the Kinect thread, but I'd like to make the OT.

 

[seady]

If our industry started gaming with the Wii remote or Kinect, everyone would say the controller we are using today is complex and is a joke.

I am always amazed at how the 'hardcore' claiming any control methods other than traditional controller (or keyboard+mouse) is 'wrong'.

Child of Eden started its marketing with the Kinect, so all the critics feel that is the 'true' way to play and therefore more easily accepted.

 

[Amir0x]

If our industry started gaming with the Wii remote or Kinect, everyone would say the controller we are using today is complex and is a joke.

I am always amazed at how the 'hardcore' claiming any control methods other than traditional controller (or keyboard+mouse) is 'wrong'.

If the industry started with Wii or Kinect and then we went on to get traditional controllers, everybody would be "holy fucking shit! Look how many genres and gameplay possibilities exist that weren't there before! Holy shit it's so precise and there's actual tactile feedback! What the hell! So little lag compared to Kinect! I didn't know this shit was possible!"

And so on and so forth ad naseum

 

[LiquidMetal14]

If our industry started gaming with the Wii remote or Kinect, everyone would say the controller we are using today is complex and is a joke.

I am always amazed at how the 'hardcore' claiming any control methods other than traditional controller (or keyboard+mouse) is 'wrong'.

Not wrong but certainly not the best for everything. Kinect and move/Wii only work for certain purposes.

 

[seady]

If the industry started with Wii or Kinect and then we went on to get traditional controllers, everybody would be "holy fucking shit! Look how many genres and gameplay possibilities exist that weren't there before! Holy shit it's so precise and there's actual tactile feedback! What the hell! So little lag compared to Kinect! I didn't know this shit was possible!"

And so on and so forth ad naseum

I think games like Mario Kart Wii is the best example. The hardcores claimed the Wii wheel is horrible and imprecise, while a lot of casuals who grown playing the game with the Wii wheel end up doing better than people using traditional control methods.

 

[Amir0x]

I think games like Mario Kart Wii is the best example. The hardcores claimed the Wii wheel is horrible and imprecise, while a lot of casuals who grown playing the game with the Wii wheel end up doing better than people using traditional control methods.

I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. You have literally zero evidence to back up any claim that that atrocious plastic wheel shell improved anyone's skill levels. Spare the anecdotes

Second of all, "casuals" taking a liking to something is no indicator of high quality. More often than not, it's an indicator that something sucks. Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.

 

[brentech]

Just realize this (p)review comes from the same man that is speaking in this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE6Z5v3UCKs

 

[Blimblim]

Having played the first level of CoE with Kinect at PAX East, I can honestly say there's no way I'd want to play it with a controller.

It's gotten even better since that old demo, especially the latency.

 

[Lord Error]

I think that's the wrong way to look at it, driving is a tactile experience by design, well by current design. A better question is would you forsake the wheel for driving the car with a controller? Considering how many people laugh at playing racers with a controller vs a wheel I think many people would say no.

Driving is no more tactile experience than gaming. You have manual input, you get feedback. Also, I'm not sure why would that be a better question? Wasn't your whole point of removing the 'barrier', the removal of a physical interface between the man and the machine in a scenario where a physical interface is more efficient and precise to use? In terms of this, the 'barrier' of steering wheel driving is very similar to barrier of controller of mouse in playing games.

 

[SmokyDave]

I think games like Mario Kart Wii is the best example. The hardcores claimed the Wii wheel is horrible and imprecise, while a lot of casuals who grown playing the game with the Wii wheel end up doing better than people using traditional control methods.

Whaaaaa? That's not been the case whenever I've sat down for a split-screen game.

Also, MarioKart. It's not as if anyone would play GT5 with a Wii wheel.

 

[Clear]

Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.

Sadly, this is absolutely true in my experience. Or at least the "truth" as it stands for the publishing/marketing arms of the industry (development most often has no choice but to follow no matter how distasteful and demeaning the result).

And yeah, based on his past exploits McElroy is a muppet, and someone who's opinions need to be treated with a truckload of salt.

That said, I'm still torn on this. I'm fairly skeptical generally about motion gaming, but I can see it fitting well with Kinect. At least til the novelty wears off and the additional physical effort involved starts counting against the overall experience.

 

[Dunlop]

I also doubt this game will play better on Kinect but

You have literally zero evidence to back up any claim that that atrocious plastic wheel shell improved anyone's skill levels. Spare the anecdotes

good point, then you follow up with

Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.

Care to provide a link to your fact sheet on "casuals"?

 

[LiquidMetal14]

I also doubt this game will play better on Kinect but


good point, then you follow up with


Care to provide a link to your fact sheet on "casuals"?

You can see it in the air man. Why do you think some sold their PS3's for 360's just to get their fill of Black Ops? It's a parallel that he struck. Doesn't need explaining. Unless you can say that they have the same savvy as us here (the hardcore). Most casuals do not. They care for simpler things for the most part.

 

[TTP]

Second of all, "casuals" taking a liking to something is no indicator of high quality. More often than not, it's an indicator that something sucks. Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.

Pretty much. Well said.

This doesn't rule out the possibility to make challenging hardcore games even with control interfaces designed for casuals.

After all, the mouse interface is a casual thing (DOS was "hardcore" before that - lol), and yet PC gaming is full of hardcore stuff.

 

[Amir0x]

Care to provide a link to your fact sheet on "casuals"?

Check popular casual games.
See how simplified they are from games past.
See this trend continue to get worse as control schemes get shallower and more gimmicky.

There is obvious actual industry wide evidence of the development communities wide drive to make games extremely inoffensive to the widest audience possible. Some have even gone on record to talk up their efforts to make the games easier to get into. Games now recharge your health after taking a few bullets, have infinite checkpoints, rarely have strategic depth. Any concept that might cause someone to think for more than a few moments is automatically reduced or removed entirely.

Games back in the day were massively more difficult on the average than they are now... and I don't think that's a grumpy old man talking through rose-tinted goggles.

With Move and Wiimote, even though I had problems with them, they still very much facilitated hardcore gameplay and concepts. They weren't so far detached that they actively forced developers to choose the path of least resistance. So far with Kinect I don't see anything but that problem.

This doesn't rule out the possibility to make challenging hardcore games even with control interfaces designed for casuals.

After all, the mouse interface is a casual thing (DOS was "hardcore" before that - lol), and yet PC gaming is full of hardcore stuff.

Of course. Although, I wouldn't really consider mouse+keyboard and move/wiimote "casual" when utilized for gaming. The Wii Wheel shell is casual. The Kinect is casual. Wiimote and Move are flawed, but still ultimately able to facilitate hardcore games with real depth.

 

[R3TRODYCE]

Whoa..Sounds amazing

 

[gblues]

Second of all, "casuals" taking a liking to something is no indicator of high quality. More often than not, it's an indicator that something sucks. Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.

I disagree, to some degree. Maybe a game that attracts casuals might be a lower quality game from a subjective standpoint, but from an objective standpoint it takes a ton of work to convey a complex idea in a simple manner.

Take Myst for example. It's a terrible adventure game: only one item in your inventory at a time, only three characters (and two of them non-interactive), and impossible to die. It had neither the humor and personality of LucasArts-style games, nor the clever-for-the-sake-of-clever, death-around-every-corner style of Sierra adventure games. It did have incredible graphics (for the time), which most veterans of adventure games scoffed as its only selling point. And it outsold every other graphic adventure ever.

But, it wasn't Myst that killed the adventure game genre. To some degree, they committed suicide, but ultimately it was the dozens of Myst clones that never realized exactly what it was about Myst that made it sell so well. It wasn't just the pretty graphics! Rise of the Robots had excellent graphics too. The game design was a fully-conceptualized world and puzzles that made sense within the world. You could find or derive the solution to all of the game's puzzles with the resources within the game world without resorting to brute force (although it doesn't penalize brute force tactics, either). There was also a detective element to the game, as there are not one but two "bad" endings. Compared to the wallbanger logic illustrated in the OMM article, Myst was a breath of fresh air.

The other thing that helped was that, being a glorified Hypercard stack, it ran on pretty much any PC with a VGA card and a CD-ROM drive.

My point is that while Myst wasn't a quality adventure game for genre enthusiasts, it was a quality product that as much enthralled players as it did baffle the game designers who couldn't see why anyone would enjoy it.

 

[szaromir]

Of course. Although, I wouldn't really consider mouse+keyboard and move/wiimote "casual" when utilized for gaming. The Wii Wheel shell is casual. The Kinect is casual. Wiimote and Move are flawed, but still ultimately able to facilitate hardcore games with real depth.

Do you play games that are actually hardcore and complex? Patrician, Europa Universalis etc.? Console games are alreadyt very streamlined experiences.

 

[Curufinwe]

Do you play games that are actually hardcore and complex? Patrician, Europa Universalis etc.? Console games are alreadyt very streamlined experiences.

A game can still be hardcore and complex without being a PC sim.

 

[RiZ III]

This is the one game that I actually want to get kinect for.

 

[Sho_Nuff82]

I dunno Ami, Dance Central is kind of hard and complex. Noticeably so even if you scale up one difficulty level. Most of the people on my friends list are brutally awful at it based on their scores. It's not something you can imprecisely flail your way through.

I think you're casting too wide a blanket over Kinect. If CoE is a game that controls well and generally "feels" better with motion controls, it will be difficult to argue for a gamepad just for comfort's sake. Miz obviously designed the game with a certain experience in mind, and it seems to be resonating with people who've tried it.

 

[scitek]

Do you play games that are actually hardcore and complex? Patrician, Europa Universalis etc.? Console games are alreadyt very streamlined experiences.

This is true. I follow the industry very closely, and play way more video games than I should, and even I see people here all the time talking about games that I'd never bother with.

 

[Doodis]

Can someone get a mod to stop all Ami's Kinect trolling...er...wait...nevermind.

But seriously, back to Child of Eden - did anyone catch Weekend Confirmed from a couple weeks ago? Garnett talks a lot about Child of Eden. Specifically while playing with Kinect, he says, "I wasn't thinking about playing a game. You can't escape it when playing with a controller because you have your fingers on buttons...But here there were literally times when I was playing this with Kinect, that I was 'in the screen'...It's totally Lawnmower Man...I was absolutely inside the environment."

So no tears, but the experience he's talking about is similar to that of our friend at Joystiq.

 

[szaromir]

A game can still be hardcore and complex without being a PC sim.

Vaaaast majority of console games aren't.

 

[Zeouterlimits]

Can someone get a mod to stop all Ami's Kinect trolling...er...wait...nevermind.

But seriously, back to Child of Eden - did anyone catch Weekend Confirmed from a couple weeks ago? Garnett talks a lot about Child of Eden. Specifically while playing with Kinect, he says, "I wasn't thinking about playing a game. You can't escape it when playing with a controller because you have your fingers on buttons...But here there were literally times when I was playing this with Kinect, that I was 'in the screen'...It's totally Lawnmower Man...I was absolutely inside the environment."

So no tears, but the experience he's talking about is similar to that of our friend at Joystiq.

Yes, I heard it. Convinced much more that the Joystiq writers extreme response. He firmly said playing with Kinect is the way to play.

 

[ShapeGSX]

Having played the first level of CoE with Kinect at PAX East, I can honestly say there's no way I'd want to play it with a controller.

Same here. It was a lot of fun to play with Kinect.

Stephen Totilo from Kotaku caught me playing the game on the big screen at PAX East:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvyxwUn7cb4

If the final game is better, that's pretty amazing. It was a great experience. I don't think I'll end up crying while playing it, though.

 

[Tain]

Vaaaast majority of console games aren't.

Vast majority of games aren't.

And then you have the Virtua Fighters and the Hearts of Irons and so on.

 

[The Wise Old Man]

This game sounds like a terrific experience and (coupled with the kinect user hacks I've seen on youtube) it was a major reason I bought a Kinect a few weeks ago. Sometimes a unique gaming experience like this demmands a little bit of hyperbole. Move on, cynics.