Using the spoken word to communicate what makes a Kinect game more fun than a non-Kinect game is an uphill battle. For one, it's not terribly easy to find someone in the gaming press that likes Kinect all that much, and if you do, they may not have more to say beyond "Movearaoundalot! Movearound! Goooooood!"
Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda has an interesting approach on to explaining what makes Kinect so great:
If you think about a game like Mario Bros., would you say Mario Bros. is a core or casual game? That's exactly what we're doing with the Kinect products. ...But if you look at River Rush, from Kinect Adventures, that in a lot of ways is like a platformer game. It's all the same things you see in platformer games. The way you summed up how you would feel about Mario Bros. is exactly the way we look at the Kinect games.
So Kinect games feel exactly like Mario Bros., Mr. Tsunoda? Exactly? That's totally weird, because most of the games I've seen for the thing look more like Wii Fit than anything else. Not that there is anything wrong with that -- I'm just saying that if you're admitting that your games are exactly like your competition's games, you might as well make sense while you're doing it.
Microsoft likens Kinect experience, games to Super Mario Bros. [GoNintendo via Videogamer]
Jonathan Holmes is the most lovable Associate Editor on Destructoid. Catch him on videos, original editorials, and on back episodes of the Destructoid Show and MTV's Road Rules. Jonathan is a retro gamer's gamer.
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Contest:
10:30 PM on 06.24.2010 | 
So really, does this in a sense confirm Microsoft ripped off Nintendo?
If, in 10 years, "River Rush" is a household name, spawned tons of sequels, make millions, has a movie deal and Mario is a distant memory... I will eat entire left foot whole, in one bite.
Problem is if you launch a peripheral, you need something to buy it for. Kudo failed to do that this year. Harmonix fortunately picked up the slack.
Also, that Kudo Tsunoda dude always looks like he's been doing blow.
I'll admit it's true when Super River Rush Galaxy 2 becomes the best rated game of all time. >.<
Anyway, if you really wanted to say it was like Super Mario Bros, this stuff would have come as a pack-in at launch.
Funny that no one tried to make a direct copycat of Mario back then, either, mostly because games came out at a snail's pace and people played games into the ground in between releases. People would get wise to it rather fast.
But just because games come out faster now doesn't mean people don't get wise to it. Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort are rather well-known, I'd say, and Wii Sports helped illustrate the motion control standard from the start - Kinect is not a standard and four years into 360's life is too late to change that.
I GET IT NOW!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOpnaAZjKG4&feature=player_embedded#!
You want human tetris? Go to Japan. In fact, whenever you see a crazy Kinect game, think about going to Japan. Japan has the weirdest games/activities ever, I kid you not.
Kinect doesn't seem to be fixing any of those issues. The games they have shown look terrible, the price is about 5 times more than I'd be willing to pay for such a thing, and I'm not even close to convinced that the hardware is up to the task. Even if the capture works as Microsoft would have us believe I can't see how 30fps is going to deliver responsive control, especially when the input is the movement of your body, something that you literally don't think about and will be that much more noticeable when the on screen action lags behind.
@mrandydixon
New Super Mario Bros. Wii is pretty much Super Mario Bros., and it never looked lame even for a second.
@benjaminajacobs
NICK ARCADE WAS FUCKING AWESOME YOU SWINE. :P
...Right?
"Funny that no one tried to make a direct copycat of Mario back then"
They did. It's called The Great Giana Sisters. We played the hell out of it when we were kids on the Commodore 64, and haven't even heard of the NES (we didn't really have those in the Eastern Bloc). Needless to say, Nintendo sued their asses... then it got remake on the DS!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Giana_Sisters
"Funny that no one tried to make a direct copycat of Mario back then"
?
Guess you never heard of the Great Giana Sisters, huh?.
All they are doing is pointing out that Mario is a good example of a platformer that can be enjoyed by core and casual gamers, and they want to take the same approach with Kinect Adventures, nowhere in the quote does Microsoft ever actually say "Kinect is exactly like Mario".
I'm not saying I agree with their assessment of Kinect Adventures, I'm just pointing out that this article is a good example of some pretty lame journalism.
You cant sacrifice precision and say you put out a hardcore product...(no matter what spin you put on it.