Microsoft may have chosen the worst possible name for this device EVER. Yes, we all sniggered at the name Wii, and many of us raised an eyebrow at the Playstation Move. Even Project Dolphin, Nintendo's codename for the GameCube, wasn't as ridiculous as this. This new name simply drips with get-rich-quick schemes of gimmicky-gimmickness.
Natal was maybe not the coolest name, but it worked. Natal is a word meaning of or relating to birth, and like it or not, that's what this was, a new beginning in gaming, albeit one filled with spastic hand flailing. But "Kinect" sounds terrible, an obvious portmanteau of Kinetic and Connect. It's insulting. Also, what's with the purple in the name? As if that green wasn't obnoxious enough.
According to Kudo Tsunoda, creative director for Microsoft, "For lots of people, that controller is a barrier...We set out to make a new control paradigm where anybody can get in and play, without having to read the instructions or learn a complicated set of controls."
I don't know about you, but I still feel that tapping the D-pad and then the A Button is more intuitive than some horizontal arm flails and an awkwardly phrased voice command. IGN's string of gaming editorials (which are awesome, btw, and are totally worth your time) remind us that if you hand someone a controller, it is almost universal that the left stick controls movement, the right stick controls camera, A jumps, and R shoots. Hand them nothing and tell them to play, and people will end up flailing about until something happens. There's nothing intuitive about it at all.
Dear god, I hate you Microsoft. If I hadn't already hated Natal, I would surely be despising it now. I hope you burn in that special pit of hell reserved for retarded game executives, where they force you to play gimmicky, rushed 3rd-party motion control minigame collections for all eternity.
0 comments:
Post a Comment