Reply With QuoteSo I guess this is Kinect's Lair.
Originally Posted by jpinard
Can they patch in a complete overhaul of the controls to be Controller only? Dump the Kinect stuff entirely? If that's possible technically is it possible politically?
So I guess this is Kinect's Lair.
From the looks of it even if you take out the control issues it's still a very bad game.
It's a Steel Battalion game. You will die for reasons you don't know or understand. Things will occur in missions that are not explained or hinted at in the briefings. It is frustrating as hell.
When the developer previews came out, I thought the promoters (lead dev's etc) looked nervous from being exhausted from development. Now it seems like apprehension because they knew the game had to go out in a terribly flawed way.
Layer the non-functional Kinect on top of that and you have a terrible thing rather than a charmingly challenging thing. It's a damn shame.
I SO wanted this to work :(
It's actually not. It's actually good game at heart (it's fun, and the scenarios really feel like you're under pressure/combat), but it's also a very hard game, which is made much more challenging by the kinect implementation.
"Challenging" is an interesting euphemism for the what's seen in the videos all over Youtube of people trying to play this turd.
I wonder if the Kinect controls work for some people but not for others?
My first encounter with that was a Kinect title from Konami: Leedmees. It's an Xbox Live Arcade game that I thought I would love. You move your arms and legs around and try to get lemmings (basically) to the exit, just like the classic game lemmings, but with your Kinect shadow (sort of) thrown into the mix. Except that later in the game's demo, I had to bend down to pick up the lemmings and deposit them elsewhere, and the game just wasn't registering me bending down no matter how I tried to do it. So thankfully the demo warned me off that the game just didn't work.
But then I heard Danielle on Jumping the Shark podcast say that it was a great game and that she was pretty far into it, so it must have registered her bending down somehow. So maybe I just needed better lighting conditions or a rearrangement of furniture, or just a kinect re-calibration. It's just that once you get used to kinect working so seemlessly for you in some games (Dance Central or Ubisoft's exercise game), you assume that it will work for all games, but apparently that's not the case.
Honestly, there's not a lot you really need the Kinect for. You need to start the engine each mission, which is pretty simple. Then there's the periscope (which I've never failed in having it work right), sitting forward to access the viewport (which works most of the time)...and changing ammo types (which honestly, sucks and is wonky as hell).
The other things that you can do only by Kinect are pretty much useless. There's a non-functional map unit you can access which gives zero information, a self destruct button (um yeah), some lights...and a venting thingie. There's also a fast speed button, but I only had to use that in the tutorial. Admittedly, I'm not very far into the game (mission 4 or 5), but I haven't had to use any of these in the actual missions.
That doesn't excuse the shitty ass controls. It's just in reality...you really don't need 80% of those stupid kinect motions. And for chrissakes, why the hell they wouldn't use all of the controller buttons, or at least let us map commands to all of those unused buttons, is way beyond my understanding.
Didn't Microsoft bankroll a big part of this as an exclusive Xbox360 Kinect game? If so, then there's your answer.
Yes. They hired a bunch of Japanese devs to make hardcore Kinect games in an attempt to prove the technology's bonafides. Sadly, the tech is terrible for anything but scoring dance moves and removing backgrounds. Its almost as if the entire premise behind Kinect was false...Didn't Microsoft bankroll a big part of this as an exclusive Xbox360 Kinect game? If so, then there's your answer.
I bet this game would have been great on the Xbox720 with Kinect2, with 2 or 3 person teams working together side-by-side. It would be shame for this to be totally shelved when they really needed to wait for MS to release kinect tech that could actually handle the game and more people.
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