Features// E3 2010: Inside the Kinect Event

Next up was Some sort of mini-game. I'm not sure if it's a standalone game. The main crux seemed to just be to ride on various things and shape yourself to dodge obstacle so you could collect rewards in the shape of a person in a funny pose - imagine a human Tetris game but In reverse. It worked very well, nothing to write home about but probably a lot of fun to do.

It's family stuff, right? So obviously there was something from with Disney. The show was possibly even more vague than the USA Today leaked report that mentioned a Disney collaboration. There was just some Disney music, a shot of the Disney castle and Tinkerbell flying around all the screens. In fact, I was left wondering what the heck Disney will choose to actually make for the system.

Now, the Star Wars thing: One of the more intriguing games on show, mostly because it was the most like an actual videogame. Now, for me it appeared to be running in real time but even seeing it live, it was difficult to tell. The player was a Jedi being attacked by stormtroopers and various other things. Just by waving his hands about as if he had a lightsaber he was able to swing his on-screen blade around and deflect lasers blasts back at the stormtroopers; he could slice the heck out of them (no actually cutting through anything though, pesky family game).

To move about he would do a dramatic Broadway dancer-style wave of his arms that sent his on screen character dashing forward. A quick thrust out of his palm did a “force push” that sent enemies tumbling back. At one point he used the Force to grab a large robot of some kind and throw it into a crowd of strormtroopers; I couldn't see what sort of gesture caused it. The whole thing ended with our hero clashing sabres with Darth Vader himself and then a fade to black.

Cool enough for me if it works as well as it seemed. It definitely had a bit of that Wii Tennis hand holding feeling, but with lightsabres instead of tennis racquets, so I'm sold.

Joyride next. The racing game Microsoft showed off last E3 as part of last year's rush to make games like LittleBigPlanet (and that most people assumed had been cancelled) was shown off. It looked basically exactly like it did last year. Controls, being the point of interest here, seemed to be the standard “hold the virtual steering wheel” set up. A boost function was activated just by the player flashing some quick “jazz hands”; mid-air stunts were just controlled by leaning and flailing in different directions.

Next up, the Just Dance rip off - Dance Central to be exact - in Microsoft's bid to cover all its bases with this new system, and risk pulling a Nintendo and monopolizing their own system in spite of their third-party partners, Microsoft did indeed show of the MTV dancing game. No Doubt's Hella-Good was the tune of choice.

The player was run through a demo of a few specific moves (“elbow thrust”, “Slide”) and then asked to string them all together to make a full dance. When he failed to get the demo portion correct the proceeding slowed to about half speed till he got it right then picked back up. The interface is a great idea, like Just Dance but vertical instead of horizontal. It's interesting to note that like Just Dance, the character on screen does not mimic the player's movements but rather exists only to illustrate the correct moves. I personally think having the player on screen with him would be ideal, but then I've spent entirely too much time thinking about a dancing game. Moving on.

Other: For good measure they also showed off using Kinect to control the Xbox menus, which seems to work pretty much exactly like it did last year. Cool, and certainly something I would possibly never tire of. It's also got video chat capabilities that, while not very impressive on their own, enabled the users to launch a photo-sharing session with a swipe of their hands.

If it works as well as was implied that it could be a very worthwhile feature, but it seemed like this bit may be more conceptual than finished product at this point.

So, that's about that. An impressive showing all in all. A good variety of casual party game type games. A couple of very impressive tie-ins, and a press event for all ages. I was already pretty convinced it was going to be a worthwhile device. Now I'm sure that MS has its sights on being the next Wii-like craze. Unless Sony's Move controller can do an awful lot to differentiate itself form the Wii, Microsoft may be able to pull it off.

The proper MS press event starts at 9:30 PST (18:30 BST) and I shall be there with bells on to hopefully inform you of how the company intends to use this thing for real video games. The rumour of course is that it will work with Halo: Reach somehow, so stay tuned to our E3 Twitter feed for all the details.