It seems like only yesterday Project Natal was announced to an audience of enthusiastic fans. The technology looked amazing, and was to change gaming for ever. Object scanning, minority report style dashboard control and AI that is so advanced that it can have entire conversations with you and even tell what kind of mood you’re in. One year later, and a large portion of these cutting edge features have mysteriously vanished. Let’s take a look at how Project Natal changed from its announcement in 2009 to its showcasing as Kinect at this years E3.
Maybe it’s a bit harsh calling these ‘lies’, but when a feature is announced for a system at an event as big as E3, I expect at least an announcement that it won’t make it into the retail system at launch. Not even mentioning them is as good as pretending they never existed in my eyes. Ok, let’s get started.
Lie 1 : Minority Report Dashboard Control
At the original Project Natal announcement, control of the current dashboard was available using various swiping gestures. You could swipe right,left,up and down to navigate the dashboard. I thought this was a great idea as the current dashboard would lend itself very well to this kind of navigation. You can see an example of this in the video below, at about the 3:10 mark.
Imagine my disappointment when were shown the new ‘kinect dashboard’ at this years E3. A seperate minidash will be integrated into the current software. You may even have to use a regular xbox controller to access this minidash, and once you do you’ll be able to use Kinect to navigate. Now that wouldn’t be so much of a problem, if the minidash was similar to the current dashboard. Instead, the new Kinect dashboard is virtually the exact same to the one you’d find your Wii. It displays various boxes across the screen, which if you point your finger at for a couple of seconds, you can access. This is a far cry from the super cool navigation we saw last year.
Lie 2 : Object Scanning
Another amazing feature that Kinect promised back in 09 was the ability so ‘scan’ objects using the device, which could then be used inside whatever game you happened to be playing. A great idea in theory, and could have added a lot of depth to the Kinect platform. Unfortunately, when E3 2010 came around, there wasn’t a single mention of this feature and when asked about it in interviews, Microsoft employees remained vague about the issue. Consider it MIA.
Lie 3: Voice Recognition
Ok, so Kinect still supports voice control. You can still stop and star movies on a whim by simply speaking such phrases as ‘xbox play movie’ and ‘xbox pause movie’. However, the system’s ability to differentiate between various people’s voices seems to have gone the way of the dodo, right along with object scanning. Another feature that, while not earth shatteringly crucial, could have provided many exciting experiences on the xbox 360.
Lie 4 : More than 2 players
The first video trailer for Project Natal clearly showed a family of four sitting down ( something I’m not even sure works with Kinect. I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t, but Microsoft are saying otherwise. We’ll have to wait and see ) playing some sort of game show title on the xbox. A recent announcement from Microsoft stated that ‘up to two players’ can use Kinect at any one time. This isn’t the worst blow ever and it’s something I can live with, but they shouldn’t have advertised more than two players in the first place if they didn’t know for a fact they could nail it.
Lie 5 : Milo and Kate
This is the big enchilada, the greatest lie ever told! Well not quite, but , in the gaming industry at least, it’s certainly up there. Milo and Kate, when it was first demoed at E3 2009, seemed like it was years ahead of it’s time, possibly because it was. The game showed a woman interacting with a small boy on her television screens in the most amazing of ways. She could converse with the child, it understood her, it could see her concern or excitement, she could trade items with the boy. It was like nothing the world had ever seen before. What’s more, it represented a host of brand new opportunities for the xbox 360. Imagine Mass Effect utilizing this system, the possibilities were endless.
On year on, and we have no idea whether this game is in limbo or out, what features are still in the product, or if it even still exists at all. Some Microsoft spokesmen are saying it’s not an actual game, others are saying it is. It wasn’t present at this years E3, except, according to Peter Molyneux, to a select few celebrities. You would think Microsoft would be showing Milo and Kate to as many people as possible, as it was certainly the most impressive piece of Kinect software that had been shown so far.
So there you have it. Whether you consider these lies, omissions or anything you’d like, there’s no denying that Project Natal is but a shadow of its former, E3 2009, self.
Source: GlimpseDog.com
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