Kick! Jump! Flail! All these actions -- and so, somany more -- await your first Kinect experience. As the first TV ads demonstrate, Kinect is meant not just for you and your family, but also your giant, brightly-lit living room. We started building home additions right after E3. What's your excuse?
During PAX, Rare unveiled another sport from its upcoming Kinect Sports: boxing. You can see a few snippets of it in the latest trailer, embedded after the break, as well as some new screens. Rare promises that more additional sports will be revealed at TGS next week. Our hope? Ribbon dancing.
That email purportedly sent out by Microsoft a couple weeks back inviting its recipients into a Kinect beta program? Yeah -- it was legit. Joystiq has received corroborating evidence confirming the program, including pictures of the promised Kinect-enabled dashboard update running on a participant's retail console. In them, you can clearly see the flatter presentation, new mini-guide and revamped Avatar editor -- complete with a re-proportioned Avatar.
Our tipsters clearly didn't read the included guidelines, pictured in the gallery bellow. Apart from the laundry list of methods via which participants aren't supposed to talk about the program, there's confirmation that Kinect hardware is indeed part of the beta, "is being packed" and will presumably be on its way to testers soon. These same sources report that the beta support site mentions Kinect Adventures, Kinect Sports and JoyRide as titles they can expect to receive for testing purposes.
We'll have more on the program as its participants continue to refuse acknowledgment of Microsoft's terms and conditions.
Twenty-five years ago, Rare founders Chris and Tim Stamper had to reverse engineer a Japanese Famicom development kit in order to make the early NES game Slalom. Today, at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Rare Talent Director Nick Burton outlined some of the very different challenges the company has run into in the developing of Kinect Sports for Microsoft.
"Kinect was a no-brainer as far as we were concerned," Burton said. "Just the opportunities it brought ... because it removes one layer between you and the computer." Burton said that Rare has always been interested in technology and game design that "is trying to remove that barrier to entry, trying to get that fun experience the entire family could have, but also getting the fidelity gamers could love."
The problem with older motion control solutions Rare has worked with -- like accelerometers and even the Power Glove -- was that the fidelity wasn't there, Burton said. Rare tried to fix this for years by augmenting the original Xbox Live Vision Camera with a PlayStation-Move-style light-up handheld wand made out of a supermarket vitamin tin (pictured above). The first-person spell-casting game they made for the wand, Soulcatcher, never got out of the prototype stage, but it did go a long way to "prove you could have that kind of hardcore depth of experience with this kind of control scheme," Burton said.
As part of a Develop Conference talk on the lessons learned from developing Kinect Sports, Rare Talent Director Nick Burton showed a short video of the near-final version of Kinect Sports' soccer mini-game. The clip shows how control jumps between different teammates as the player passes the ball, with the Xbox 360 AI controlling player movement automatically (a la Wii Sports tennis). Check it out after the jump.
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Kinect Sports comes packed with more than half-a-dozen ways to play, but my limited time with the game only gave me a chance to check out one of them: Bowling. More »
