Microsoft Holiday Preview

I was invited to Microsoft's holiday showcase last night, and since I only got to play a couple of Kinect games, I really wanted to go in the hopes of trying even more. Unfortunately, the party (as you can see from the photo) wasn't just videogames, and Xbox was just one small corner. Who really cares about Windows 7 or the Zune? I want my games!

Anyway, they had a couple monitors running trailers, and two screens running the new Halo, but there were four screens devoted to Kinect games. Sadly, I'd already tried Dance Central and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. I did get to play Kinect Adventures and Joy Ride, and I share the same opinion that our illustrious Fruit Brute had on them. Adventures was fun, but Joy Ride didn't control very tightly. But most importantly, I got a much closer look at the actual Kinect hardware and was able to get some answers to some questions I had.

It's a shame it's not wireless, but the cable that comes with it seems long enough to reach unless your 360 is across the room. My main concern is how close you can get to the camera and still have it work as I'm in a tiny Brooklyn walk-up. "You can get pretty close," reports Erin Hofto, Global PR Manager for Kinect. "Actually, the cool part about the sensor is because it recognizes people and locks onto them, it understands what things aren't people, which allows it to understand the room around it and it will actually adjust play space based on that. You do need to be far enough back that it can track your feet, but if it sees that your living room is fairly narrow, it won't make the play space wider than that so you're diving over couches. Which is nice, because it means you can have smaller spaces and still have it work."

It's nice to know that Microsoft kept in mind that not everyone in the world lives in a house with a wide, spacious living room like the ones you see in the trailer, and made sure that Kinect would operate in various kinds of spaces. And the fact that it recognizes people by tracking joints so well that a second player can literally jump into the game and play with no calibration required is impressive. Hofto also made sure to mention the benefit of being able to push software updates to the Kinect to fine-tune it over time without forcing the purchase of a new hardware. I really wanted to play Dance Central again, but the music the DJ was playing at the party was so loud, you couldn't really hear the game very well, so I didn't see the point of trying to dance when you can't hear the music. Which just means that I'm going to have to wait for the Kinect launch on November 4 to dance my ass off!