Joystiq continues their character assassination campaign of the Kinect this morning with a review of Sonic Free Riders. They subtitle their review "Board To Death", which is kinda funny.

Crazy. My wife and I went down to the local bumblefuck WalMart and they had a metric ton of the sensors.

My wife is playing the dance central demo now. I may never get my xbox back...

what demos are packed in?

Is anyone actually paying that? Sure, someone will... but my guess is that these will be as common as the PS3 Move come Black Friday (or sooner).

No, I am sure it will be in big demand. I live in a little hick town in North Carolina, and our walmart was sold out of them and all of the games were gone early this morning. If that is happening here, then it must be insane in other places.



anyway, another question to owners:

Once calibrated, do you have to stand in the center of the "zone" or can you move a couple of steps over and it still work? I know this sounds like a weird question, my TV is kind of "caddy cornered" and it will be hard to stand centered in front of it and have complete room.

I wonder about that too. The price point is so high for what is essentially a peripheral. Then again the Wii Balance Board was near impossible to find for months and months and this unit is clearly miles better than that glorified electric scale.
If I found one at Costco, I might pick it up to try it out. I just have a feeling that once I move into my new house, where my gaming systems will be in my "man cave", there won't be enough floor space for this thing to work properly. I'd feel a whole lot better knowing that I could take the unit back to Costco if it's not working out for me.

But it's still in stock at Amazon...

There's Dance Central, Joyride, and Your Shape.

Right now we're rearranging the living room...

It wasn't this morning.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6283514...es%3Btitle%3B1

All I can think of is that episode of Better Off Ted where the sensors fail to see black people.

I'm always an early adopter of things that fail or take a back seat (in my case: eye toy, xbox camera, wireless headsets for PS3 and Xbox, Rock Band peripherals, etc). Unless Kinect gets an exclusive title -- like a Star Wars game or maybe Fight Night get's Kinect support --- I can't see investing in this unless my kids really, really want it.

News story is gone. What did it say?

That the Kinect facial recognition feature had trouble with darker-skinned people.

This is how it works. And that's why it works fine under low light.

That's pretty cool.

interesting.

Stopped by Costco at lunch. They seem to only have the 250GB Kinect Bundle for sale, for $389. Then went across the parking lot to Best Buy. They had lots of cameras for sale. The rep said they were selling very well though.

Tried the Kinect at the set-up in-store. They had ping pong set. Thought it was undeniably cool tech. The ability to control the character with your movement was interesting and entertaining. Didn't think this game controlled as well as ping pong on Sports Champions with the Move, though I only played for a minute and have played the Move game lots. I certainly noticed a brief lag with my movements. Found it was actually better to anticipate the ball a bit to make up for the lag. I was pretty impressed, but nowhere near enough to actually spend $150 + $50 for the experience.

I got mine yesterday but haven't had time to try it out. I never even knew that I would get a free Avatar prop, and a exclusive cat or whatever from Amazon for ordering it along with a couple games. Pretty cool.

I picked mine up yesterday afternoon and played it for a couple of hours last night. I only have Kinect Adventures and the demos that come with it.

The Sensor -- It was very easy set up. You do need quite a bit of space. I have enough distance away from the sensor(8 ft) for 2 players, but I don't think I have the width for us to play like it is meant to be played. I played by myself and had no issues. It takes some time to get the hang of it. Playing without a controller of any kind is very weird at first. From a technology standpoint, the kinect is incredible. The kinect dashboard navigation is kind of clunky, but I haven't used it enough to decide if it is the kinect or just me. I was not able to try out the Video conferencing yet, I have no friends that own the kinect yet. I love the way the games take pictures of you at different parts of the games...it can be quite hilarious.

Kinect Adventures -- This is just a basic tech demo mainly, however I had a blast doing the challenges. I enjoyed the obstacle course the best. The minigame where you float around and pop the bubbles is very lame.

Kinect Joyride Demo -- I didn't care for this demo at all. The kinect operated how it was supposed to with the game, but it wasn't very fun at all.

Dance Central Demo -- This is definitely the killer app of the Kinect right now. I suck at dancing, but this game is an absolute blast. It is very challenging and you will definitely work up a sweat playing it. I really can see this game starting a phenomenon. Dance Dance Revolution is now obsolete...big time.

Your Shape Fitness Evolved Demo Unfortunately it doesn't give you very much to try out in this demo. However what I did do was great. I definitely want to pick this up soon.


Overall -- I am extremely impressed with the Kinect so far. The Wii's technology is now obsolete. I will admit that the Kinect is a little pricey, but I feel it has endless potential. I would love for more demos to become available on Live. I really want to try out Kinect Sports.

Joystiq has an interesting look at their staffers gaming rooms to see if they are Kinect-worthy. From the sounds of it, one should definitely measure their gaming space before purchasing.

We had about 8 feet between the couch and the TV. That simply wasn't enough space to play two player.

We had to rotate everything in the living room sideways so now there's about 14 feet between the tv and the back wall.

Works much better now, but was a real pain in the ass moving everything.

The kids came home after school yesterday and played for a few hours. They loved it and were having a lot of fun. They liked the casual jump in/jump out play on Kinect Adventures. It's cool that if one kid is playing and another wants to join in, they just step in front of the tv and start playing.

Overall, I think it was a decent purchase. I went back to the local WalMart late last night to pick up some stuff and they still had a bunch of Kinects. The case was packed full of them (at least 12).

LOL from the Dance Central Message Boards.

I've already seen pictures on my Facebook friend feed. I made the comment that I'm going to have to start wearing clothes now. Awesome.

Oh great, just what we need! Another buzzword: "kisexting."