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Not sure if this is the right place to offer some feedback or strike a debate, but I must point out a flaw in the 'Worse with Kinect' article.
Grizz, you write 'The Kinect is horrible tech which more often than not doesn't work properly - that's providing you have a suitable room in which to use it in. At least Playstation Move has some decency to it and is generally put to good use. Whereas the Kinect is serving as a huge gimmick'.
Yes, the Kinect is a huge gimmick and everybody knows it, but horrible tech? The Kinect is a seriously advanced piece of technology. I believe I remember reading somewhere that they were considering using it to pilot spacecraft, among other things:
http://www.1up.com/news/ten-best-uninte ... for-kinect (http://www.1up.com/news/ten-best-unintended-uses-for-kinect)
It's all about having the right conditions for use, from the sounds of things you haven't been using the Kinect in the right environment (sounds cramped), what your article is saying is like saying:
'Oh my computer is crap because it overheated, I'm in the desert, but that shouldn't effect it. It should be able to function anywhere'
Okay, bad example. But you get the gist.
The Kinect has it's flaws. But it's biggest one is the fact that Microsoft is marketing it as a kids toy.
In the Minecraft article
"In the end, Minecraft may seem like a little high priced for the graphics you get, but the excitement
and creativity it brings is well worth the money and more"
annoys me no end.
This implies that Minecraft intended to have good graphics.
It didn't, that's why it's been such a success and that's it's addictive charm, you don't spend money on Minecraft, get on it and think 'Boy, these graphics suck. I sure regret spending the money on this'. That's like buying 'Sins Of A Solar Empire' for it's first person shooting mechanics.
Allow me to play Devil's Advocate for a moment...
The Kinect is essentially a failed experiment in motion detection. It can't detect basic movement most of the time in the most spacious of environments. It must be placed at exactly the right angle or a motion like a basic arm movement or a side-step might go un-noticed. Having played around with a Kinect for at least an hour trying to get it to work, I finally picked what it must have deemed the 'right angle' and can personally say it is the most frustrating thing I have ever worked with.
This is where I stretch the English a little...
Quote"In the end, Minecraft may seem like a little high priced for the graphics you get, but the excitement
and creativity it brings is well worth the money and more"
This can be read in two ways:
1) "You don't get the high-quality graphics you expected for the price but everything else makes up for it"
OR
2) "You don't get the high-quality graphics you might have expected for the price depending on whether or not you knew anything about the game before, but everything else makes up for it regardless"
Both statements more-or-less are the equivalent of the quoted statement, but mean entirely different things. Personally, I choose to believe number 2.
OK that's it from me :P
Quote from: "Vanguard"Not sure if this is the right place to offer some feedback or strike a debate, but I must point out a flaw in the 'Worse with Kinect' article.
Grizz, you write 'The Kinect is horrible tech which more often than not doesn't work properly - that's providing you have a suitable room in which to use it in. At least Playstation Move has some decency to it and is generally put to good use. Whereas the Kinect is serving as a huge gimmick'.
Yes, the Kinect is a huge gimmick and everybody knows it, but horrible tech? The Kinect is a seriously advanced piece of technology. I believe I remember reading somewhere that they were considering using it to pilot spacecraft, among other things:
http://www.1up.com/news/ten-best-uninte ... for-kinect (http://www.1up.com/news/ten-best-unintended-uses-for-kinect)
It's all about having the right conditions for use, from the sounds of things you haven't been using the Kinect in the right environment (sounds cramped), what your article is saying is like saying:
'Oh my computer is crap because it overheated, I'm in the desert, but that shouldn't effect it. It should be able to function anywhere'
Okay, bad example. But you get the gist.
The Kinect has it's flaws. But it's biggest one is the fact that Microsoft is marketing it as a kids toy.
Unfortunately what the world has developed Kinect in to does not take away from it's failure to be put to good use in the industry Microsoft designed and promoted it for. Much of what MS demonstrated before launch didn't even make it to release and in games such as Star Wars Kinect, it's not hard to see why.
It's like modding a very poor game to improve upon it - or utilizing a game engine in ways the developers failed to capitalize on and editing the source code because it was broken to start with. Out-of-the-box Kinect, for it's intended purposes, is a sub-par piece of kit which hasn't lived up to any of the hype Microsoft have thrown at it - and even MS themselves dropped much of what they tried to do with it before it hit the shelves.
An additional FYI, trying Kinect titles in very open spaced rooms did not improve the experience much - which puts a dampener on that charming desert analogy :P
Feel free to call me a hater, a basher, whatever. But if it doesn't work for it's intended purposes, then there's little more to add.
Fair enough, I just wanted to add my two cents. Makes a lot more sense now when you put it down to a failure of intention rather than actual technology.
And I've justed edited my post because I gave an additional FYI twice!
Better safe than sorry!
Well John, I havn't read the entire thing yet since I've been busy alot these weeks with moving but i skimmed trough it and it looks like another great issue! Keep up the good work.
P.S. Maybe you should add a "The statements in this article are provided by the author and therefore reflect his/her visions and/or beliefs and do NOT reflect the visions/beliefs of the editor or TLO as a whole." That way nobody has anything to complain about XD
Quote from: "Martin Thompson"Well John, I havn't read the entire thing yet since I've been busy alot these weeks with moving but i skimmed trough it and it looks like another great issue! Keep up the good work.
P.S. Maybe you should add a "The statements in this article are provided by the author and therefore reflect his/her visions and/or beliefs and do NOT reflect the visions/beliefs of the editor or TLO as a whole." That way nobody has anything to complain about XD
Discussion is what we want! Though hopefully everyone accepts that every article doesn't represent the views of TLO. :D Nevertheless, I'll add appropriate notices for upcoming issues.