Kinect thread(Avatar Kinect out now)

[The Sceneman]

remember that fucking interview with the Rare guy at PAX or something?

"Theres a hot dog guy, who walks around carrying a hot dog. It's just mad"

[iconoclast]

All that interview does is confirm Rare is dead. At least they had a good run and went out on a high note (Nuts and Bolts).

[naff]

He pretty much just confirmed Rare as a Kinect only studio, not that anyone cares about Rare these days. (I never cared).

[naff]

I only heard Nuts and Bolts was bad, game came out pre me getting a 360 and because I hear it was bad I didn't bother. Is it a Borito recommended game?

[iconoclast]

Nuts and Bolts is amazing. It's like, the second best 360 exclusive, right behind Dead Rising (if you discount all of Cave's ports since they're not truly exclusive).

Viva Pinata is good too if you're into all of that simulation gardening bullshit.

And Jetpac is the best $5 XBLA game not named Geometry Wars.

And kameo was okay.

RIP Rare

[cool breeze]

haha, those are my two favorite 360 games too.

yeah, Nuts and Bolts is really good.  First game I got all the achievements for (until they put out dlc  ).  It has problems but it is one of those games that really deserved a sequel because the core idea behind the game is so much fun.  You basically build vehicles to complete various objectives.  The problems was that the objectives often just races or didn't require you to get creative with your vehicles.  A sequel with more objectives that has puzzle solutions instead of using the same strong racing vehicle would have been perfect.

Between all the racing objective sand multiplayer, it seems like they thought racing was the strongest part of their game.  For me it was just building and messing around with vehicles that was a lot of fun.

and I still say that Blast Corps 2 and Nuts and Bolts 2 should be the same thing.  Build vehicles to destroy shit.  Fuck Banjo (not in the way Nintendo fans want, I mean, don't make Nuts and Bolts 2 a Banjo game.)

[AdmiralViscen]

N&B is AAA

[AdmiralViscen]

And no that's not a stealth "sucks"

[GilloD]

This weekend they had all these huge trailers out in the party areas of Seoul. Lots of drunko Koreans trying to play some dancing game and fucking it up. Also, some kind of singing thing? They loved that shit. Huge lines.

[maxy]

First review is out

Sonic Free Riders...7.5

http://www.ign.com/videos/2010/11/01/sonic-free-riders-kinect-video-review

Kinect is making Sonic games better...Kinect

Two player touching mode sounds interesting

[Raban]

[Damian79]

Assuming that Kinect is going to be an overwhelming success what will MS do about the regular games?  I dont think that fps's and many other types of games suit the thing.  Will they release an alternate console?  Or let Sony and Nintendo have the hardcore market assuming they release a new console?

[maxy]

Yeah,xbawks hardcore days are numbered.Halo 4 will be a laggy dating sim,MC true identity will be revealed...he is an overweight soccer mom

Now something Kinect tech related

NaturalMotion believes it has found an opportunity in the circumstances, and will soon launch new Kinect-specific module to its animation system Morpheme.

How does the tool work, in terms of Kinect detecting motion and that being translated to game animation?
The Kinect system runs live alongside our Morpheme runtime engine. The Kinect module in the Morpheme runtime retargets the live motion data onto your character and from there can be treated like any other animation data. For authoring, our Morpheme Connect tool presents a simple Kinect drag and drop node in the animation blend tree.

This means, for example, you can apply Kinect to only the upper part of your character, whilst the lower part is driven by a walk cycle. Or you use the player’s shoulder tilt to drive the direction of the walk cycle.

Microsoft provides this technology itself. Why pay for more?
Microsoft provides the Kinect technology, SDK and core dev tools. NaturalMotion provides two important pieces to use Kinect in a game.

Firstly, dedicated Kinect algorithms for retargeting and noise reduction.

Secondly, there’s a tight integration into a graphically authorable animation engine. In our experience, both are required to get the most out of a live motion input system.

Is the module competitively priced? How many studios are you hoping to adopt the tech in two years?
Kinect for Morpheme is very cost effective in terms of the time and money it saves both compared to creating a similar solution in-house, as well as in terms of sheer reduction in iteration time.

The tech has already been deployed in multiple studios, so we’re very optimistic for the months ahead.

Who’s your intended market? Independent studios?
It’s both publishers and independent studios. Right now, we probably have a few more of the former than the latter, but that mainly reflects hardware availability.

http://www.develop-online.net/features/1031/The-tech-that-can-drive-Kinect

[maxy]

[youtube=560,345][/youtube]

 

 

[archie4208]

Looks like MS has the casual audience all sewn up.

[Beezy]

Kinect gameplay vids are the best. I need more.

[Sho Nuff]

My question is: Is ANYTHING he is doing reflected on screen?

[demi]

Burger King is giving out a Kinect every 15 mins

https://bkkinect.bk.com/

[G The Resurrected]

thanks demi, now I don't need to buy a 2nd Kinect. All hail burger king... I mean Five Guys, fuck buger king. I'll take the Kinect though.

[maxy]

More tech talk,interesting read
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-kinect-tech-interview?page=1

One of the biggest and most controversial stories surrounding the system has been the removal of an onboard motion processor. Instead of processed data being transferred over USB, instead the raw streams from the camera, depth sensor and mic are beamed across to the 360, where the CPU and GPU work in concert to decode and process the data. Kipman makes the claim that the console has the power to spare, saying that no 360 game - not even the latest state-of-the-art title - uses all of the CPU and GPU power available.

"As much as we like to talk about bits and percentages, you take a game like, I don't know, Call of Duty: Black Ops - there's a significant amount of processing, be it CPU or GPU, that still remains on the table," Kipman says.

"So after that, when we came to this revelation about games and future games that would be coming to Xbox, we looked at it and we said - 'is it worth the trade-off to put on-board processing on the device when we think we can create magical, unique, deep, thorough experiences without it?'

"That trade-off is easy, it's about the affordability of the device. From the perspective of bringing to market this amazing deal, £129.99 with Kinect Adventures, plus sensor - buy one and have your entire family play, it's a very interesting customer value proposition. We can create games which are as rich and thorough and as deep as the games which we have on our platform today and which we will have tomorrow.

"Then the conversation becomes simple: you start moving into a world which says, why keep something complicated when you can make it simple? We decided to have our cake and eat it too."

There is plenty of merit in what Kipman says here beyond the shoe-horned PR. Theoretically, there is nothing to stop developers creating Kinect titles that look and feel exactly like a premium core gamer title, because the system overhead is minimal - a low amount of CPU time spread across two threads on a single Xenos CPU core plus an even smaller amount of GPU resource. Take a look at Kinect Adventures and you see a fully fleshed out Unreal Engine 3 title, and that's exactly the sort of tech that would not take kindly to being robbed of significant amounts of system resources.

Kipman also confirms that the Xenos GPU is used to process the depth information and help build the skeletal data on which a great many Kinect titles depend.

"One of the major key ingredients of the experience is machine learning. Machine learning in our world is defining a world of probabilities. Machine learning, particularly our kind, which is probabilistic, is not really about what you know, it's about what you don't know," he explains.

"It's about being able to look at the world and not see duality, zeroes and ones, but to see infinite shades of grey. To see what's probable. You should imagine that, in our machine learning piece of the brain, which is just one component of the brain, pixels go in and what you get out of it is a probability distribution of likelihood.

"So a pixel may go in and what comes out of it may be - hey, this pixel? 80 per cent chance that this pixel belongs to a foot. Sixty per cent chance it belongs to a head, 20 per cent chance that it belongs to the chest. Now this is where we chop the human body into the 48 joints which we expose to our game designers. What you see is infinite levels of probability for every pixel and if it belongs to a different body part.

"That operation is, as you can imagine, a highly, highly parallelisable operation. It's the equivalent of saying, pixel in, work through this fancy maths equation and imagine you get a positive number, a positive answer, you branch right, you get a negative answer you branch left. Imagine doing this over a forest of probabilities. This is stuff where you'll get a thousand times performance improvement if you put it on the GPU rather than the CPU.

"GPUs are machines designed for these types of operations. The core of our machine learning algorithm, the thing that really understands meaning, and translates a world of noise to the world of probabilities of human parts, runs on the GPU."

    Xenos 

The full GI.biz  interview is well worth a read, with a second part coming tomorrow. While Alex Kipman expertly side-steps a fundamental question or two, his comments do serve to remind us that Kinect is truly a remarkable evolution in console gaming. The sheer technological achievement in bringing a fully featured real-time motion capture system to the Xbox 360, with support for multiple players and without sapping too much in the way of the console's resources is something of a miracle that perhaps gets overlooked.

Future is here

Holodeck
360

Btw,MS has upped its holiday Kinect sales predictions...5 million now

[Beezy]

thanks demi, now I don't need to buy a 2nd Kinect. All hail burger king... I mean Five Guys, fuck buger king. I'll take the Kinect though.

I'll try this also, but I never win these things. I don't mind having Kinect if I don't have to pay for it.

[cool breeze]

Kinect

won't buy it but if it's popular it might force Nintendo to release a console that isn't nearly a decade old...probably not w/e

[archie4208]

Reviews are in! 

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/11/04/kinect-review/

If Kinect does work for you, congratulations: you have what amounts -- for now -- to a novelty peripheral that is in no way geared towards the day-one buyer or "core" gamer. Microsoft conceived a potential game-changer with Project Natal, it just seems like Kinect was born prematurely.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/reviews/2010/11/buy-a-house-clean-your-floor-move-your-butt-ars-reviews-kinect.ars

The Good

The hardware is easy to set up, with good instructions
The games are simple to jump in and play
Using your hand as a cursor can be fun
The games make you move, and tend to be a good workout
Voice commands are useful in some circumstances
The camera can adjust itself to put you in frame
Games still work in low light conditions
It knows who is playing, and uses that account
The effect is uncanny when everything works right
The Bad

The menu system takes much longer than just using buttons
The hardware sometimes has issues hearing you or seeing your movement
The games are very similar
Without buttons, you lose control in certain parts of certain games
It starts at $150, which feels expensive
There is lag. It's not terrible, but it's there
The Kinect Hub doesn't do everything, or even most things
The Ugly

Too many games used the "take pictures during gameplay" gimmick. We get it—playing games on the Kinect makes us look stupid. It almost feels like you're playing a game so the 360 can laugh at you
Verdict: Skip... for now

...oh.  :'(

[Howard Alan Treesong]

5 million units

As it turned out, removing my glasses was the fix. I performed the Kinect ID setup again and sped through it in a flash. The console recognized me. All was well. Except for the fact that I need my glasses to see, and didn't really care to take them off every time I wanted to be recognized. I tried things again wearing an older pair of glasses that had a thinner, matte metal frames. Kinect was fine with them. My conclusion: the frames of the glasses I wear on a daily basis are too reflective for the Kinect sensor to handle, basically bringing the system to its knees.

lol, Kinect wants you to go get LASIK already you hipster poor

Kinect doesn't like:

- black people
- glasses-wearing people
- messy people
- small-roomed people
- table-owning people
- poorly-lit people
- improperly-dressed people

sounds like a winner

[archie4208]

[youtube=560,345]cV-x62DQa0c[/youtube]

At least it can pick up pregnant women dancing!

[Howard Alan Treesong]

At least it can pick up pregnant women dancing!

come clubbing with me next weekend, I'll show you how to pick up pregnant women dancing

[maxy]

Kinect doesn't like:

- black people
- glasses-wearing people
- messy people
- small-roomed people
- table-owning people
- poorly-lit people
- improperly-dressed people

 

He also likes nice titties

[youtube=560,345][/youtube]

There are tons of videos on youtube but I can barely watch them,some people in there are just...are you for real?

I even saw a kid in wheelchair,wtf

Americans are crazy

[demi]

Dance Central looks so fun, I want to play it

[naff]

[youtube=560,345][/youtube]

[pilonv1]

Dance Central looks so fun, I want to play it

8/10 on Eurogamer, better than Sports Resort or anything Move

[ManaByte]

I only have about 2 1/2 feet of room in front of my TV stand. No Kinect for me.

[T-Short]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-04-fighters-uncaged-review?page=2

Before you can take part in an actual fight you must play through the most boring tutorial sequence in the history of the world. Because you couldn't work out for yourself that raising your right knee will make your on-screen avatar raise his right knee.

But here's the hilarious twist - it won't! Fighters Uncaged is so terrible at recognising your movements that any incidences of your avatar actually doing what you do are rare and precious moments to be treasured. When you raise your right knee, there is only a small chance your fighter will raise his. (Even if he does, the lag is so bad you will have either grown a beard or reached menopause by the time he gets round to it.) He is equally likely to do a kick, do nothing, perform a sweeping attack or, if he's feeling really creative, throw a punch.

...

Then it's time to view that six man-strong character roster. All the fighters look like extras from a scene in a Police Academy film where one of the dislikeable characters ends up in a gay bar. Think leather waistcoats, bare chests and big beards, and characters with names like Ratface and Rider. Good grief.

2/10

Kinect

[iconoclast]

Kinect is trash, surprise surprise. Still buying one for Steel Battalion and Futatsugi's game.

[chronovore]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-04-fighters-uncaged-review?page=2

Before you can take part in an actual fight you must play through the most boring tutorial sequence in the history of the world. Because you couldn't work out for yourself that raising your right knee will make your on-screen avatar raise his right knee.

But here's the hilarious twist - it won't! Fighters Uncaged is so terrible at recognising your movements that any incidences of your avatar actually doing what you do are rare and precious moments to be treasured. When you raise your right knee, there is only a small chance your fighter will raise his. (Even if he does, the lag is so bad you will have either grown a beard or reached menopause by the time he gets round to it.) He is equally likely to do a kick, do nothing, perform a sweeping attack or, if he's feeling really creative, throw a punch.

...

Then it's time to view that six man-strong character roster. All the fighters look like extras from a scene in a Police Academy film where one of the dislikeable characters ends up in a gay bar. Think leather waistcoats, bare chests and big beards, and characters with names like Ratface and Rider. Good grief.

2/10

Kinect

I thought about the lag, and it dawned on me that Fighters Uncaged needs to realign itself around becoming a Slow-Motion Fight Simulator, or maybe a Tai Chi trainer.

[MyNameIsMethodis]

BWAHAHHAHAHA
  :lol










PS Move 4 LYFE

[Howard Alan Treesong]

sounds like Kinect is so bad and works so poorly, all $500 million can buy you is enough wishy washy press to hopefully muddle through the holiday season

...it will probably be enough :'(

Kinect doesn't like:

- black people
- glasses-wearing people
- messy people
- small-roomed people
- table-owning people
- poorly-lit people
- improperly-dressed people

... sounds like a cool guy, does he want to hang out or bone my sister? Because ... i can make it happen.

when you put it that way, I realize: Kinect is the perfect Tea Party candidate

[maxy]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2010-11-04-fighters-uncaged-review?page=2

Before you can take part in an actual fight you must play through the most boring tutorial sequence in the history of the world. Because you couldn't work out for yourself that raising your right knee will make your on-screen avatar raise his right knee.

But here's the hilarious twist - it won't! Fighters Uncaged is so terrible at recognising your movements that any incidences of your avatar actually doing what you do are rare and precious moments to be treasured. When you raise your right knee, there is only a small chance your fighter will raise his. (Even if he does, the lag is so bad you will have either grown a beard or reached menopause by the time he gets round to it.) He is equally likely to do a kick, do nothing, perform a sweeping attack or, if he's feeling really creative, throw a punch.

...

Then it's time to view that six man-strong character roster. All the fighters look like extras from a scene in a Police Academy film where one of the dislikeable characters ends up in a gay bar. Think leather waistcoats, bare chests and big beards, and characters with names like Ratface and Rider. Good grief.

2/10

Kinect

That review has been written by overweight 5/10 Alan Wake girl.


He should review it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqWCxwfjWyE&feature=player_embedded

 

[MyNameIsMethodis]

I would have sex with taht pregnant girl so many times god she is so hot

[Diunx]

Dance Central looks so fun, I want to play it

[Great Rumbler]

Kinect!

[youtube=560,345]DZR1gSvnOI0[/youtube]

[maxy]

Fighters Uncaged is made by some Belgian studio i think
But there are some other reviews outside that nerdy EG chick

http://xbox-360.nowgamer.com/reviews/xbox-360/9527/fighters-uncaged
6.4/10

Its just an average game,not that it matters anyway

Kinect is getting better reviews than pink dildo,especially games...hehehe

[demi]

maxy, are you gonna get kinect? we need unbiased impressions.

[maxy]

Nope.I always follow games,nothing interests me personally except Kinectimals(i like cats) but i will survive without it...somehow
Core gamers have nothing to find here,few years needed

Tech works great(for $150 mass market product)...cheap for what they are trying to do
Software needs to evolve,developers with crazy ideas needed,sitting games required.

I will post my unbiased opinion about COD:Black Ops single player...uhhh

[demi]

Ok post some BOPS impressions. I'm mostly interested in single anyway.

[Sho Nuff]

I so wanna play Dance Central and shake my sexy ass, but Sho Nuff does not wipe his ass with 200 dollas

[maxy]

Giantbomb Kinect for the entire Day Live stream

http://www.giantbomb.com/chat/

[Sho Nuff]

They're playing Kinect Adventures now. So wretched

[demi]

Is ryan playing?

[Stoney Mason]

Is ryan playing?

Ryan and Jeff.

so far its all like I expected. Nothing that the core would be interested in but I could see casuals eating it up at least in the short term. Especially kids.

[demi]

mmm i am gonna fap today

[demi]

God Ryan is so fucking hot. His heavy breathing just from standing makes me cum

[Raban]

[demi]

omg I just saw Ryan and Jeff's tummies. I love Kinect

[maxy]

Ryan is destroying Jeff.

Ryan

[demi]

They arent active because theiy dont want their bellies showing like most insecure fat guys. LET THOSE BABIES OUT

[Stoney Mason]

lol. The beach volleyball looks horrible.

The running events in the sports title looked a little fun but everything else in that one looked terrible. Rare sucks.

 

[Stoney Mason]

I know none of you agree with me, but I think all this stuff looks pretty goddamn fun.

I think I'm fairly receptive to casual stuff. Unlike most I don't have a fierce hatred of casual gaming nor fear that it will destroy hardcore gaming. That being said this stuff looks neat if I wanted my 5 to 10 year son or girl to play with but there is no way on earth I could imagine myself playing any of this for more than like 5 minutes.

While I actually think it makes for weaker games, from a marketing perspective the no controller idea was brilliant. You can't get very much more casual than that.

[Beezy]

I know none of you agree with me, but I think all this stuff looks pretty goddamn fun.

I think Dance Central looks fun. That's about it do far.

[Stoney Mason]

I'm pretty excited about dancing and fitness games, which I feel are the devices strengths but I'm really interested in seeing what can be done from here. It's not flawless but I think they can do some really neat things with it. Like, one day I expect to see R.U.S.E. 2 using kinect.

None of this current implementation stuff interests me at all. Not having buttons seriously limits anything you could ever do with it from a core perspective imo.

What slightly interests me is how would they use it for added benefits in traditional core games where you already have the controller in your hand. I could think of some interesting theoretical applications there.

But I'm not kidding myself. MS first and foremost goal is to sell this to soccer moms and very young kids which determines what sort of software will dominate for it.

[demi]

DAmn yall see that stomach right in your face? Shoulda screencap'd it