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Xbox 360's Project Natal


The Derrit
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So this is an Eyetoy with a mic?

It's Seaman with a Camera.

I love how a bunch of people's comments on other sites has been, "OMG!! Nintendo Waggle is dead!! LOLZ!! NINTENDO'S DONE FOR HA HA HA!!!"

Sure, sure it is, I'll be flailing my arms around while playing Gears of War 3 (end sarcasm :roll:)

Apparently, the presentation was ACTED out, the actual game play side of it, is being privately shown.

I like some of the game announcements so far. Can't wait for Mass Effect 2, Monkey Island, and Turtles in Time remake.

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So, not counting expansion packs, or the fable games that spawned this conversation, I think that's Lionhead's full lineup. This is not believing what I read on the internet, this is personal experience with all (bar one) of Lionhead's games that has made me intimately aware of the studio's completely broken production model.

'guys I didn't like these games so therefore they are flawed'

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OK, seriously though... Is this going to be "Wii 2.0"? When you think about it, it sort of fits. You have a serious change in the direction of control interface, aimed at making casual gamers, where the action on screen in determined by the natural movements of the player instead of buttons and d-pads. That's what Nintendo did, and it payed off big time. Is MS going for the same sort of market now (which makes sense... Nintendo showed there really is a market made up entirely of non-gamers, and they profited quite nicely from it)?

Also, that skateboard things for Tony Hawk's new game just screams WiiFit board. Longer, with some fancier guts, but it's the same thing.

Now I have to see what Sony is going to do this year. Will they step into this new pseudo-virtual reality race? How will Nintendo respond? Will they even have anything to offer that can compare?

Maybe this E3 won't suck after all.

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http://kotaku.com/5274544/why-xbox-360-new-controller-is-called-natal

Named after a town one of the people involved in the development lived in.

Same language. Instead of being name just after the word its named after a town name "Christmas". Got to love other languages. You can name it something and most won't know a thing. I'm one of the few people I know that thinks the name for the drink chai tea is redundant because chai means tea. So thats tea tea. Correct name for that is chai masala. "spiced tea".

woops I went on a little far. I'm half portuguese and I am minoring in linguistics.

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When I saw this I immediately thought of the EyeToy, which if I remember correctly didn't set the world ablaze regardless of how many times Sony rereleased the damned thing.

I feel that this thing will ultimately become a strictly a gimmick, especially if it's not going to be packed in with 360s or anything else. Since it's a peripheral, and most likely an expensive one, support for it will be limited at best. Sure some developers will make games for it but if they don't sell well the rest of the developers will shy away from it and the peripheral will die.

Ultimately this is just a stepping stone to virtual reality which is something I'd like to see. We have the technology to do it, it'll just take a few more years to make it cost effective.

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My friend was joking how pedophiles will have a field day with the "little boy game". lol.

To me it seems almost like a tech demo. I think if they held off and fleshed it out a bit more for the "720" it could be an industry changing product. The 360 is going on 4 years old, I'm sure they are working on a next gen Xbox at this point. So why invest all this time and effort (and god knows how much money) into a peripheral/gimmick for an aging system? Maybe the 360 will be the PS2 of this generation and keep pumping out games for years to come though.

/speculation

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I'm not joking.

The heck you aren't! Since when is an Eyetoy for the Xbox "brilliant"?

This is a ploy to take some of the Wii's casual market appeal, nothing more. I expect results similar to the Eyetoy's success (or lack thereof).

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It's like a perfected EyeToy to me. I think the followup efforts have to prove its usefulness. Can't really judge these things right out of the bat yet.

And I find it funny that some Wii players are calling it 'gimmicky' when most control schemes using Wii board and Wiimotes are just that. Only Nintendo and a few other companies ever moved beyond it being gimmicky into something that actually made sense. Ironic.

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The heck you aren't! Since when is an Eyetoy for the Xbox "brilliant"?

This is a ploy to take some of the Wii's casual market appeal, nothing more. I expect results similar to the Eyetoy's success (or lack thereof).

Because Natal is not just a WEBCAM which is what the Eyetoy is. It's an entire system consisting of facial/body recognition, voice recognition, and motion-sensing in 3D space. Eyetoy looks at the picture and says "there is an amorphous blob here;" Natal looks at the picture and says "there is a person standing here and he's wearing a 3-piece suit and a duck mask and he's standing about 5 feet away from the TV with his right leg forward and his left leg about 2 feet back and he's also holding a sword. Oh it's MIKE! I'll sign him into his gamer profile."

Just for one second look beyond the hardware and try to realize what happens when you put all the pieces together. Whether the software developed for this system will appeal to you or not, there's no denying that the technology in and of itself is brilliant.

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The more I watch the Natal demonstrations, the more impressive it seems. The Milo thing is a bit of a fantasy at the moment because the AI needs to be VERY good or it won't work the way it's shown. But the body movement recognition is honestly the best I've seen even compared to the Wiimote or the EyeToy.

Right now, I'm only worried about the price. It'd be worth the investment if it's $100 IMO.

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But the body movement recognition is honestly the best I've seen even compared to the Wiimote or the EyeToy.

Uh. That's because it's a target video. It's fake, those people are just acting along with the TV, not vice-versa.

Also, voice recognition LOL. Every voice-recognizing software I've heard of takes bloody ages to train, and God help you if you have two people who sound a lot alike in your house (my brother, father, and I all sound almost exactly alike).

So, I'm keeping an eye on it, but not expecting them to deliver on half of what they have shown.

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The technology is impressive..apparently it recognizes like 42 seperate joints in the human body, in up to four people at a time.

I'd be more excited if I cared about motion control...there are very few Wii games that make me wish my 360 or PS3 had motion control, even if it worked as well as Nintendo hoped it did.

On the plus side, Natal will most likely end up being cheaper than buying four nunchucks and 3 wiimotes. If MS was smart, they'd forego the next price drop and just start putting Natal in every 360.

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