Kinect Adventures

The Short


Pros
- Pack-in with the Kinect, so essentially it's free
- Five minigames and a few bonus ones
- Uses your in-game avatar
- River Rafting and Reflex Ridge are pretty fun and control decently
- Graphics looks surprisingly good for a freebie

Cons
- Space Pop, Rally Ball, and 20,000 Leeks aren't particularly enthralling
- The tech, overall, doesn't recognize you particularly well
- All five games get dull pretty quick with limited courses and options
- "Story mode" is so stupid its embarrassing
- Bad load times
- Requires you to be an extremely specific spot at all times or else it'll boot you out. Two players only exacerbate this.
- As a game meant to show off the Kinect, it's both fickle and underwhelming

Reflex Ridge is actually quite a workout

The Long


Welcome to Kinect, the new motion gaming toy that requires you to rearrange your living room and flail about like an idiot even more-so than the Wii. Microsoft certainly pushed the crap out of their new EyeToy, and it apparently paid off, seeing as they sold tons of these things. We managed to snag one on the cheap (almost entirely for Dance Central) and I still remember setting it up and then realizing we couldn't play two player because it requires like nine feet of free space between you and it. One living room re-arrangement later and we were back, booting up the pack-in game Kinect Adventures and getting ready to Become the Controller.

Kinect Adventures, like Wii Sports, was included free with the Kinect, undoubtably to both show off the hardware and provide a jumping-off point into the magic of motion controls. It's weird they didn't put the infinitely better Kinect Sports in instead; both were made by Microsoft (or Microsoft owned companies, aka Rare), but Kinect Sports was more a comparison to Wii Sports. Wii Sports was actually pretty decent, giving you a lot of games with a lot of variety, so much so that many people just played that and didn't buy any other games.

I'm going to tell you right now, if you only play Kinect Adventures, you'll probably die of boredom. Because it isn't that great.

Rafting is pretty fun, even two player

There's five games in this compilation, so I'm going to blitz review them for you. Ready? GO.

Reflex Ridge is the best one in the whole thing, and also the most exhausting. It's basically those weird japanese game shows where you dodge things (or ABC's Wipeout) except set on literal rails (mine-cart rails). You have to jump, duck, stand to the side, and point your arms in different directions to get tokens. Jumping also makes you go faster (for a bonus boots to tokens based on time), meaning you jump a lot, and this thing very quickly is secretly making you exercise. Overall, this one controls almost perfectly, is fun and has a decent level of courses, and is actually pretty entertaining.

River Rafting is the other good one. You control a raft and direct it by standing to the right or to the left, with jumping...well, jumping the raft. Not really possible...whatever. Your goal is to get tokens, and some of the later levels get pretty devious. You can play it two player, but then you both have to coordinate on directions which makes it more of just goofing off rather than going for high scores. It looks gorgeous (which is probably why it's in 90% of this game's screenshots) and you do get a sort of sense of excitement jumping off waterfalls and what not. It controls good about 80% of the time, so it passes.

It's only going downhill from here

Ralley Ball is one they pushed hard at E3 a few years ago, and it's essentially Breakout with your body. You hit balls towards a bunch of blocks as you try to get to the tokens hidden behind. You can get bonus balls, direct the hits, etc. Well, you are supposed to be able to direct the hits. The Kinect is not very good at picking up your movements in this regard, especially with body/hand position. There's a distinct disconnect between what you are doing, what you want to be doing, and what your person on screen does. It turns into insane flailing (meaning children are better at this game than me; I burn out), which is entertaining for a while but ultimately unsatisfying.

Space Pop is a stupid game that I find unoffensive, but have to admit that it actually isn't great. Basically it's a game where you are trying to pop all the bubbles in a three dimensional space...sort of. Your Z axis (forward and backwards towards/away from your TV) is only two-tiered, undoubtably to make it easier. You are in "space" so you have zero gravity, which means you flap your arms to go up high and float and put your arms at your side to drop. Bubbles pop out all over and you have to pop them. It's...sort of fun? But once you break it down you realize it probably took one guy three seconds to make it. Flash games have more depth than this.

Lastly we have 20,000 Leaks, which isn't about a small country all going to the bathroom at the same time. You are underwater in some glass dome thing, and every fish apparently is either a dick or wants you evicted back to the land because they body slam your thing constantly. You have to move your hands, feet, and head (sometimes all at the same time) to cover leaks so your magic limbs can repair the leaks for points (and not drowning). This one would probably have scored higher on my list if it actually worked well. The Kinect controls are horrible on this one, making it totally not fun to try and figure out where the hell to put my hands and feet. I actually wanted to like 20,000 Leaks, because despite its simplicity it seemed like a sort of fun, Twister-esque game. But the bad controls kill it.

At least the sea turtle isn't a massive jerk. 

Perhaps my biggest complaint is the fact that this game, while serviceable with the Kinect controls, doesn't do a very good job of showing off the tech. The menues are extremely cumbersome, with the Kinect losing me frequently, especially when trying to play with two players. If you play two players you have to stand like six miles away from your TV, and even then it'll just straight boot someone out mid-game if they step to far to the left, right, forward, or back. 90% of two-player games consist of the Kinect complaining at me or my partner because I stood out of its tiny "sweet spot." It's more frustrating than fun, and makes me feel like I bought a magical piece of technology from the future that somehow got dropped on its head as a baby.

This is especially noticeable when compared to more recent Kinect games, or even just good release-day Kinect games (like Dance Central, which is still the best game on the system by a long shot). As I said already, Kinect Sports works pretty dang good; why not pack that in instead? Probably because if they packed garbage in, people would feel obligated to buy the full priced sports game. Like I did. Wait, that means I got suckered in! What the crap?

Damn you, Microsoft and your space bubbles!

I should point out they did try to add a sense of a "point" to the game. There's an adventure mode where you run through a set of several activities (picked from the five above), get some sort of reward (usually a weird animal it makes you voice and act out with...which is actually pretty hysterical in a horrible, horrifying way), earn an achievement, and continue on. This is voiced by awful narration by the "Adventure Crew" who likes to "Scour the world looking for adventure!" Clearly somebody needs to tell them about the high quality Kinect Xbox 360 Microsoft Full Body Experience Video Game Controller System, so they can stop booking flights on their private jet and just stay home rearranging their furniture for several hours only to be told to "Step Back" or "Step Right" when all they want to do is TURN THE RIVER RAFT TO THE RIGHT.

I'll drop you into a river, Kinect Adventures. Only without a raft. BURN. Wait, the plastic boxes float. BOO.

So I can't really assign this game a price, since you get it for free with your Kinect. You can't even trade the dumb thing in; it's only worth like $1 at Gamestop, so you might as well hold onto it in case you randomly feel the odd call of ADVENTURE urging you to raft down a river and pull your coffee table out of the way. It has about two good games out of the five included, which now that I think about it makes my scoring this game extremely easy.

Two out of five stars.

Fruit Ninja Kinect

My life loves our iPod Touch, and I can't blame her. There's tons of games coming out for the thing, and when $5 is considered "pricey," I know the system is going to stay well within our price range.

Fruit Ninja was a popular game I actually never bought, but I played the "Lite" version (essentially a demo). It costs $1 but even then I was too cheap to get it, gleaning enough satisfaction from the score-limited demo.

Well, we picked up The Gunstringer today, because I will support literally everything Twisted Pixel puts out because they are totally awesome. And it just so happened to come with a code for a free copy of Fruit Ninja Kinect. Expect a Gunstringer review once I beat it, but after my wife and I put in about two hours of Fruit Ninja Kinect (combined), I think I've got enough information to throw down a review.

A pixel theme, which I will never unlock because I'm not good enough. 

Normally this game runs for $10, and is the first Arcade Kinect game. Which is good, because the Kinect has really been barren since its release in terms of games. Basically you have Dance Central, Child of Eden, and...um...Kinect Sports? We own a fitness game too but we never use it. I'd say my wife has gotten our money's worth out of it just through the hours she's spent in Dance Central, but it's still sad to see such promising hardware being abandoned.

Well anyway now we have Fruit Ninja Kinect, a game which costs 10x as much on the Xbox as it does on the iPhone. So is it worth it?

Well...yes and no. My opinion is biased because I technically got it for free (and for free it's a great deal). The game also has a pretty hefty amount of content. There are a large amount of unlocks that can cosmetically change the game: change the slash-colors or patterns, change your "shadow" that is always in the background so you can know where you are cutting, or change the background itself. These are gotten by doing crazy feats (like cutting all strawberries and only strawberries in a level) or not so crazy ones (like cutting 100 bananas over the course of your Fruit Ninja career). This offers a good deal of playability (also having an achievement for cutting 10,000 fruit means they expect you to be in it for the long haul) and incentive to come back.

But that being said, there is really only a few modes, and all these revolve around the same thing: cutting fruit with your hands. Which would be fine, if not for two key problems.

Co-op is a blast, except you'll probably hit your neighbor in the face. We did. A lot. 

First, several modes require a precision you just can't accomplish with the Kinect like you could with a multi-touch screen. Classic involves hitting fruit while not cutting bombs. Hit a single bomb, or miss cutting three fruit, and it's over. The problem is that after a short amount of time the game just goes crazy with fruit and bombs. This works on the iPhone where you have relatively precise controls, but on the Kinect you'll find yourself cursing because of dumb mistakes.

Second is that the slice is finicky, except when it isn't, except when it is. Basically you have to swing your hand a certain distance before it'll start counting it as a "slice" (to prevent small movements from registering, I'd assume). The issue is you can start, say, in the upper corner trying to cut fruit. The cut won't start until about half an arm's length after you start swiping. It also doesn't always line up from where you think your hand will be and where the game thinks it will be relative to the fruit. If this sounds confusing: it is. Basically it makes most players' intuitive hand cutting motions not always work, because unless you give yourself a buffer to start you'll not get the cut in time. This, paired with the above, makes for a lot of cheap failures (and in a game that requires precision for combos, it also makes getting high scores frustrating).

It's fun once you figure it out, but the lack of precision is a big problem. 

All that aside, however, I had a fun time with Fruit Ninja Kinect, but it certainly wasn't $10 fun. Kinect owners are probably getting desperate and will pick this up just because it's a game that works with their Kinect, but I highly suggest waiting until it's $5 (or better yet, grabbing it with The Gunstringer, which is an awesome game). The fact that most of the achievements are score based only adds to the frustration.

One final point, though, is that the co-op mode (where you can either compete or work together) is a stinking blast and a laugh riot. I'm also going to assume this game is totally great with kids (we shall test this in the near future on nieces and nephews), because those not obsessed with scores can take pleasure in just chopping up fruit with their hands (complete with satisfying splatters).

If I had a star rating, I'd give it three out of five. If I had a recommended buy price, it would be $5 (or free with The Gunstringer)