Monday, March 21, 2011

Kinect Sensor for Xbox 360 - Product Review

The Xbox 360 is definitely one of the top two game consoles on the market with the PS3 being the obvious contender. Xbox 360 has awesome graphics and tons of great games available for play. The added Kinect hardware makes this gaming console even more desirable than it was to begin with.

Kinect for Xbox 360 is tons of fun with family, friends, kids, and really any group of people. There are already enough games available for Kinect that there is really something for everyone. It is also a surprisingly good workout. I am  not your stereotypical gamer who out of shape because of spending too much time with a bag of chips and a television. I don't work out all the time, but I stay relatively active and I was very surprised to find my muscles sore after the first weekend I had Kinect. It really works your whole body in the same way that playing most sports does.

The Kinect is also surprisingly easy to use. Both the body-controller function and the voice-controlled function are very intuitive. I have never found myself needing to contort my body in odd ways in order to get the console to do what I want it to. In the same way, I have never found myself shouting at the console or speaking in a monotone or anything else to make it understand what I am trying to say. It is very good at recognizing speech and movement the way they come naturally.

One thing to keep in mind about the Kinect is that the advertisements, like all advertisements, are misleading (my rants about advertising will wait for another day). In most of the video advertisements, you see groups of people sitting and standing at about the distance you would normally see people watching television from or maybe even a little closer. This is completely unrealistic. It takes a lot of space to play Kinect games. The living room space in my apartment is situated so that the television is in the corner of the room and my sectional sofa in the opposite corner. This makes a usable space in between the television and the sofa that is approximately 7ft deep by 10ft wide. This space is only barely passable for playing Kinect games with 2 people. With one person playing, the space works quite well, but with 2 people, the game often gets paused or just gets confused because someone stepped outside the range of the camera or couldn't step far enough back.

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The Bottom Line:
The Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 is incredibly easy to use, a good value for the price, and a ton of fun if you have the space for it, but make sure you have the space before you spend the money.

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Related Products I Recommend:









Kinect Sports - Xbox 360














Xbox 360 S - 250 GB Console

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