As I sat on the train travelling into London to get my hands on — or in front of – Xbox’s latest development, Project Natal, I was apprehensive. For the uninitiated, Natal is Microsoft’s latest bit of kit, due for release this Christmas. Although it is merely a peripheral to attach to an existing Xbox 360 console it has been called a “new Xbox” by the software giant themselves and is seemingly being treated with the same pre-launch PR and precident that we’d see for a new console proper. So, many eggs, one basket then.
Natal allows users to experience controller-free gaming. At the core of the device is a skeletal mapping technology which is able track four separate people at once, mapping 48 points on each body. So, rather than waving a fat white stick about to make a bowler raise and lower his arm, if you body pop your avatar body pops. I know what you’re thinking: Wii 2.0.
And therein lies the apprehension. On paper it all sounds very impressive (add voice recognition to the above goodies) but is this coming too late from Microsoft? Admittedly they’ve done away with the need for a controller all together, but Sony did that when they released the Eye Toy back in 2003. So, Eye Toy 2.0?
All that said, this being a new bit of gaming kit that doesn’t hit shelves for nine months it was hard not to be excited about demoing the new technology and, well, I’m sad to say that I’m not quite as blown away as I was hoping. In its defence, I suspect this is a product of the software we used to demonstrate this new technology.
A hang-over from the first preview of Natal at 2009′s E3 expo, the three pieces of demo software showcased there are still all that’s around to supposedly ‘show us what Natal can do’: Milo and Kate, Paint Party and, the game I played, Ricochet. Simple in both premise and execution, the aim of Ricochet is to hit a ball down a virtual cricket net of sorts to smash the boxes at the end, with bonus boxes and a countdown timer all going toward your final score. As the ball (or some times balls) bounce around, your aim is to hit them back using any available part of you body.
Ricochet: It's just not cricket.
In theory this sounds like a laugh, and in reality it is a laugh. We were paired up in to teams of two and the competative spirit (and buckets of sweat) followed soon after with high scores continually trying to be beaten. After each game you’re shown various still of you mid-game throwing some mad shapes to the amusement of all around. However as we wheezed our way through game after game I couldn’t help but think that I’d done this before, and it all came back to the cynics view that, from this demo at least, Natal really does find itself somewhere between Nintendo Wii and Eye Toy.
I’d be interested to see what software developers have in store for Natal’s launch; this is when we’ll really start to see what it’s capable of. What we’ve seen so far surely only scratches the surface of Natal’s reported capabilities.
Nintendo almost single-handedly created the now massively profitable market of ‘casual gaming’ when it released the Wii so it will be interesting to see if Microsoft sees Natal as something for casual gamers or for more old school, or even hardcore, gaming fans. Wii re-wrote the rule book a few years back and the best titles are the ones which embrace its control system in new, interesting and intuitive ways. With Natal being much more powerful and flexible than that I don’t think a few tech demos are going to do it justice just yet.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks