kinecting a beta tester
I’m a week late, so shoot me. :p
For those that have seen my twitter posts before or that have been over to our place, have seen that we’ve got a Kinect
But since its been out now for a few weeks, i’m more than free to talk about my thoughts.
Up until I got it a week before PAX, I was a bit skeptical. Things said about lag, motion capture, and it being a novelty, all sort of actually pushed me away from it since something like this really hadn’t worked in the past with other platforms.
But after hooking it up and playing around with it, I was hooked. Meg sat and watched the first few times, not really all that interested in it since she had her Wii. But after getting her to play around with Kinect Adventure’s (which comes with the retail Kinect), Kinect Joy Ride
Rewinding a bit.
Setup was not all that hard, and maybe a bit exciting for me considering i’m a techno-geek, once I figured out a small issue since I didn’t read the instructions fully. Since I had the original Halo 360 console, I had to use the splitter that comes in the box to power the Kinect sensor, but if you have one of the new 360 Slims, it will be powered directly from the console.
After turning it on, doing some updates, and trying several times to get through the setup (remember that not reading the instructions part above?), I found that you must have the sensor’s USB connector plugged INTO the back of the 360, not the front ports. And it cannot go through a USB hub either. This is due to the amount of information transmitted back and forth and hub’s split the time between ports, this goes for the 2 front one’s as well. They’re not on a dedicated bus. But I got it up and running.
The tutorial does say 6-8 feet of distance, but I found that 8-10 feet was the sweet spot. Being at 6 feet caused the sensor to miss some things. This required us to move the couch back and the coffee table out of the way and moving one lamp for better lighting, but once that was done, things were good.
Joyride was the first game I played and it was alot of fun. Sports had some fun things in it, but it seemed a bit Wii-ish in characteristics. And when Adventure’s finally came around, I had so much fun playing it that I did not heed the warning about taking breaks. I suffered the next day with muscle’s I didn’t even remember having being rather sore. And during this time, I really saw no lag to speak of, the motion detecting at times was a little rough though. This required a quick recalibration since the sensor would be vibrated out of position a little from our ‘spongy’ floors. But overall the experience overall was enjoyable.
The voice recognition works surprisingly well and is a real convience to use when pausing a movie, sports viewing in the ESPN blade, or launching something. One thing, it doesn’t distinguish between players voices, so this might be a nuisance if too many people are calling out different commands while playing around. The one feature that is missing that they had talked about at E3 was the Xbox on/off. This was left out during development. And from an interview on Major Nelson’s podcast with Alex Kipman, he stated that would require the 360 and sensor to be using some power at all times, so it was opted to be left out.
The automatic sign-in works a majority of the time. Where I’ve done the Kinect ID 4 times or so, Meg’s only done it once or twice, and it shows. 90% of the time it recognizes me as long as the light is decent, and signs me in. But Meg has only about a 25% success rate. It does state though the more you do the connect ID in various lighting or time of day conditions, the more success it will have.
Overall, Meg and I really like it. I don’t see how it would work with FPS’s though, but with adventure and party games, its going to be great. This is actually a great product to get the whole family involved. It has something for everyone and gets you off the couch. And the friends and family that we have come over have enjoyed it themselves as well. A few even now owning it themselves. I can see our Wii now sitting unused except for the Netflix streaming on the TV in the bedroom.
On my brothers. At last contact, both are doing well despite the conditions and pick up in fighting over there. But the packages my family has been sending have been helping. I also ran across this back a month ago: 
That’s my one brother, 1stSgt Jonathan Wyble. He was injured not to long ago in an IED explosion, and thankfully only received minor wounds and a stage 3 concussion.
Now back to trying to get rid of this damn cold. So until next time, be well.
wow…
Its been a very busy month for me, not with just work, but with other things as well. Having two brothers in Afghanistan is a mindful, but more on that in another post.
This post was more to just vent and show how pathetically stupid customer support for the gaming industry really is (there are some exceptions).
So as I had previously posted, Brett is wanting to play Mafia II, but is unable to get it installed since he doesn’t have internet access except for email. Steam was absolutely of no help saying over and over ‘He will need to connect to the internet at a cafe or such to do it then.’ HELLO?!?! HE’S IN A GODDAMN WAR ZONE!!
And then there’s 2k Games.
Here’s my original email to them:
From: thejaxx@gmail.com
Date: 20/10/2010 02:50:37
To: usa@take2support.com
Subject: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia IName: David Wyble
Email: thejaxx@gmail.com
Platform: PC
Game: Mafia IIQuestion: Hello, My brother who is currently serving in Afghanistan just received Mafia II and emailed me with a problem. He can’t install it on his laptop due to no internet connectivity. Unfortunately they do not have internet access over there except for email through the Dept of Defense system and therefore cannot install the game. He still has approx 7 months left and asked me to help him out. If you want to email him directly with some suggestions or a way to help him out, his contact info is as follows: GySgt Brett Wyble – ************** Or please reply to me with something that may help. Thank you much.
Pretty clear I would think.
Well, three weeks later… Yes, three weeks, I get this response:
Dear David,
Before we look into your problem we require more information on the system you are running the game on. The best way to gives us this information is to attach your Direct X information to an email.
To do this – Start menu > Run > type DXDIAG > click Ok, this will then load the Direct X diagnostic tool. Once this has been done click on Save information and save the Text file on your PC.
Now reply to this email with the file attached and we will look into the problem and be back in touch as soon as possible.
Kind regards,
MattTechnical Support
I have no words to describe my utter astonishment.
