Just so you don't think you're lost, or that some whacko has hacked my blog, yes, I am the same guy that just four months ago posted my less than stellar initial impressions of Kinect. However, being a tech enthusiast, gaming enthusiast, and heck, I'm a game blogger, and the fact that I stumbled into some money I didn't know I was going to get, I bought the thing. My impressions as a hardcore gamer of the experience will come later, but this post isn't about me. It's about my wife. You see, after setting it up last night, a truly magical thing happened.
My wife played a video game with me.
And had fun.
Now this is utterly stupefying because, God love my wife, she's not a gamer. The only games she plays well at all are Tetris and Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. And it's been a secret desire of mine for a long long time that somehow, someway, it would click for her and we could share what is probably one of my biggest passions together. While I like those two games, I certainly yearned for a more "meaty" experience to share with Mrs. DaringOne. She just doesn't work a controller terribly well, and she is very obviously the Kinect demographic.
But I have to step back a bit to the first part of the night after I'd just set it up. I decided to check out Zune to play around with the voice commands. My wife was interested in this, and I showed her "Xbox, fast forward. Faster. Faster. Play." Then I handed her the keys and said, "Give it a shot. Just talk to it." So she went with, "Xbox, Pause." And so it did. And it was at that moment that I could see the magical *click* in her eyes that said "that's really cool". So after a little while we put in Kinect Adventures, and played a couple of games of Rally Ball together. We had a blast together, and laughed hysterically at a few of the pictures that it took while we were playing. It was at that point that a friend of mine who also just bought Kinect logged in and we checked out Video Kinect.
Video Kinect is great for the simple fact that anyone with a 360 and Kinect is afforded video chat abilities. Much like Apple's FaceTime, the power of convenience makes this application. My wife was ecstatic to be able to see her friend in Florida while we froze here in Ohio. We spent a good hour and a half talking with our friends in Florida before we finally went to bed.
My opinion of Kinect, as a hardcore gamer, hasn't changed much. It's a bit more responsive than the first time I played, but overall I still find it to be somewhat laggy but with potential in the hands of the right developer.
But I'm not the target demographic. When Kinect was announced at $149, I seriously had no idea what demographic they were shooting for. Clearly, my wife is the target demographic. The non-gaming, no real interest in games, never really played games, and doesn't ever want to hold a controller person, who has someone in their life that's a gamer is the demographic. Also, children, most certainly children are a big part of this demographic as well. Granted, this is apparently a small demographic, but when you think of the number of Xbox 360 consoles out there in homes, this isn't as small a demographic as you'd think. If they can extract another $150 from even a quarter of their install base, not to mention software sales and licensing, this thing will be a booming success.
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