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(More customer reviews)Kinect is a very new system and finding interesting ways to use it remains a challenge. Mini game collections are in no short supply this early in the peripheral's life and at least the premise is sound. Execution is key. I think Dance Central and, to a lesser extent, Kinect Sports got it right, or perhaps right enough. Games like Sonic Free Riders demonstrated how a potentially good game can be ruined by difficult controls.
Then there's Game Party in Motion (GPiM). I'm not familiar with WB making decent games, but I nonetheless had hopes that GPiM could provide some good old fashioned entertainment. It has an impressive lineup of games including darts, horseshoes, and skee ball. The menu system/navigation went for simplicity and is fairly easy to work through once you get the hang of activating the confirm and cancel commands. To confirm, you hold your right hand around waist level without extending the arm. You can put your hand directly off to the side, a little in front of your or behind you. Cancel is the same with the left hand; if you had to extend your arm, it would conflict with the system pause, so this slightly odd position is to maintain consistency which is NOT itself a bad thing. More on that in a bit.
The tracking in the minigames ranges from passable to infuriatingly awful. In the bean bag toss, for instance, no amount of lateral throwing motion made the bags travel anywhere off of dead center and I could not for the life of me find any correlation between the speed of my throw and the distance traveled by the bag. It's just too easy to throw straight in the precision games and too hard to get the distance/power right. Games like the arcade style basketball shooting don't recognize certain throwing motions. Throwing from the waist was fine, but a standard freethrow form (hands over head) had the game prompt me to step back further even when there was no more room to do so (and using the Kinect tuner, my hands were indeed visible throughout the motion from well before that distance). Pacing is also a problem. By default, there is a countdown before your actions have influence on the game, presumably so you can get move around without accidentally throwing something. However, you can also do the gesture for Cancel to essentially pause the game, requiring a subsequent Confirm before you can start playing again. On top of that, the countdown is far too long and on certain longer games having to wait five seconds after each and every dart/throw/shot is absurd and makes every single game seem needlessly tedious.
One of the stranger behaviors of this game is use of primary hands. You have to dig through the options to find where to switch between left and right handed play, and this cannot be performed in game; if you miss it, you have to quit and try again. The game does not even try to infer which hand you are trying to play with. And this may have been deliberate. Why, you ask? GPiM does not support left handed players. Yes it lets you pick the option, but think about it for a second. What if you are trying to play one of the many games that uses an underhand throwing motion? Where is your left hand during it? That's right, it's roughly waist level from start to finish. That means a typical left-handed underhand throw is recognized by the game as Cancel, aborting the throw and requiring one to motion Confirm to give it another go.
As a lefty, this is inexcusable. Roughly half the game is impossible for me to play and the other half I still have to worry about the poor tracking and shoddy mechanics. This is easily the worst motion control I've seen on the Kinect so far (yes, worse than Sonic). This would make for a terrible iPhone game, let alone a $40 console title. Don't buy it. If you are thinking about it, close your hand in a car door instead. If you are thinking of getting it for someone else as a gift, skip it and just stab them with a sharp instrument. Repeatedly. The waiting room of the hospital will provide hours more entertainment than this pile of garbage. I suppose if you really hate someone, you can gift it to them, but stabbing is still cheaper.
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Game Party: In Motion Game Party: In Motion is a family-friendly mini-game collection exclusively for Xbox 360 that utilizes the unique hands-free motion capture capabilities of the Microsoft Kinect Sensor.* The game contains 16 arcade influenced games including Darts, Hoop Shoot, Rootbeer Tapper, Table Hockey and more. Multiplayer functionality is at the core of the collection, with 2-4 player support available online and up to 16 player support available locally. Additional features include: the ability to use your Xbox LIVE avatar in-game and Facebook cross functionality.
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