So the big three have fired their collective shots across each others bow in this year’s E3 and I’ve learned something very important about myself. I must not be a gamer anymore.
Let me clarify: I love playing video games, but I don’t seem to be nearly as excited and genuinely dislike some of the more beloved franchises on each of the consoles.
Yesterday morning, Microsoft held their pre-E3 shin dig and announced new User Interface changes for the 360 to make the experience more in line with what we all thought we were getting when Kinect came out and everything will be controlled with gestures and voice if we so please. The highlight of this part of the conference was “Xbox Bing” that allows you to search the Xbox universe using only your voice. For example, if I were to say, “Xbox Bing Sesame Street”, everything related to “Sesame Street” would appear for me to peruse.
Also announced was a new app for using YouTube. This is a great new addition to the social networking apps already available and in fact might become my favorite social networking app yet if it wasn’t for the data caps that are poised to start making me change the way I consume media, but I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date.
I really wish that the other apps would be updated to allow us to be able to see Twitpics or follow links since I feel that they are useless without that functionality.
Also announced was live television streaming to the Xbox, which looks interesting.
Microsoft also announced a few diversionary apps that make use of the Kinect technology that were made available immediately. I downloaded a couple of them and played around with “Kinect Me” and “Buddy Creator”.
“Kinect Me” (or is it “Me Kinect”?) is an app that would create an avatar by scanning your face and body and creating an avatar with your face and clothes. It takes pictures of your doppelganger to share. It works fairly well and it allows you to get some achievements, but it has a few shortcomings. First thing that’s apparent is that there is not a way to edit your body type and thus, I looked nothing like myself. I am a pretty big guy and the Avatar was skinnier than anyone I know, but at least I know what I’d look like if I were to lose an amazing amount of weight and bone density. The second issue is the fact that you really can’t do anything with this thing except share it on Kinectshare.com, so there really isn’t a point.
“Buddy Creator” is a pretty exciting app, but it’s not because of its content, but because of the possibilities opened with the technology. What it does is scan the front and back of an object, in my case a few plush animals I borrowed from my daughter, and inserts the object in the game space. You create a personality for the character and provide a voice and it takes you to a rather lame game where you follow on screen directions asking you to do simple gestures. The issues with this app is that after doing the gesturing, there really doesn’t seem to be much else you can do with the character but watch it do the bizarre action animations based on the role the app gives it. For example, I scanned an Elmo plush and the app assigned it to a “clown” personality and this apparently means that he will walk around and poop balloons and confetti. The on-stage demo of this app showed 1:1 body tracking and I never could find where I could do this or where I would be able to hear my voice over work be used and I was REALLY looking forward to hearing that. If anyone knows if there is something I’m missing, then please tell me as I love this idea, but the execution seems slapped together. It’s pretty awesome to be able to use your own things in the game space as it was shown in the early Kinect trailers. An interesting side bar is that I tried to scan my daughter into the game, but she came out as a deformed monster baby with my arm jutting out of her armpit. The results were so disturbing; especially with the “Ninja” character profile, I had to delete her entirely.
There was a huge Kinect push this year from Microsoft for all of the other games announced with some really intuitive control schemes being planned for core games, like head tracking in “Forza 4” that allows you to look into turns, audible calling in “Madden 12”, and weapons training in “Ghost Recon” that looked rather impressive.
Of course there was a focus on casual games and this is why I made my previous statement. I am not looking forward to anything but the casual games like “Kinect Sports: Second Season”, “Dance Central 2”, “Disneyland” and the like. I mean, sure, I want to play “Halo 4” and the update of the original “Combat Evolved”, but there wasn’t much excitement behind it.
This wraps up the Xbox conference, for me anyways, as I really have no opinion about all of the stuff I don’t think I’ll ever play. I’ll try to get my thoughts on Sony’s Conference (the Vita), and Nintendo (Wii U) tomorrow, but until then…party on dudes.
P.S. Next year, hire less over the top actors M$. They made the games look dumb.
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