Kinect: The “secret” formula for awesome controller-free games

Don’t make it too intricate

Doing away with the controller might make it easier to pick up and play – after all, you’ve essentially cancelled out the ‘pick up’ part – but the trade-off is precision. With their glowing bulbs, gyrometers, accelerometers and whatnot, Move and Wii MotionPlus give the parent machine a reference point by which to better decipher just what the hell it is you think you’re doing. Kinect, by contrast, has to work everything out from the toe-bones up.

Don't scratch your wrist, or you'll end up head-butting a cliff.

The difficulties this can cause were apparent at every level during our time with the peripheral, from simply navigating menus to holding an imaginary steering wheel in Joyride: make a hard turn while playing the latter and your arms will cross, confusing Kinect’s skeletal mapper and sending the car into a destructive straight. None of this is crippling, and doubtless there are workarounds to be found at the coding level, but for the moment, any interaction that requires real finesse of motion – such as selecting individual units in an army, or completing a 3D rubix cube – should probably be left off the menu.

Get the most out of ‘whole body gaming’

Kinect is the one and only means of control available that involves the entirety of the user’s fleshy bits. Never again will your kneecaps feel left out when you play videogames. Microsoft is doing a determined job of trivialising this still-remarkable selling point, however, with such mind-blowing contributions to living room entertainment as jogging on the spot or ducking a bit. Kinectimals (and the increasingly ethereal Milo & Kate) shows the most potential here, keying off a range of expressions and postures, though there are also glints of a bright, omni-interfacial tomorrow in Rallyball, the Pong clone from Kinect Adventures. ‘Multi-ball’ power-ups pack a real punch when your groin is the paddle. More please.

Avoid hand-to-hand combat and ‘handheld’ in general

When Darth Vader dropped into the Kinect Experience to do battle with one of the Cirque de Soleil chaps, everybody went ‘whoop’. Faked or no, there’s something about a lightsaber fight that never fails to get us salivating. It’s probably that bit where you’re holding a sword made out of laserbeams.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced this is the wrong kind of game for Kinect. Not to mention golf games, baseball games, tennis games, fishing games or indeed anything that hinges on the gripping of a thing and the swinging thereof into another thing. Why? Because thin air doesn’t give much feedback. To make the connection between gesture and clash of blades on-screen, you need to really feel the shock of the impact running up your forearm. Likewise, when you’re reeling in a nice fat carp there should be a corresponding tug on the wrist, rather than the sensation of washing your hands under an invisible tap.

We'll see if it's still grinning when I slap it round the face.

Make it look good

Somewhere along the line, we’ve contracted the idea that motion-sensitive games always, a priori look like testicles on toast. Which explains why one of the real shockers, for me, about getting Kinected was just how attractive some of the games were in motion. The rippling, girning tiger mugs of Kinectimals speak for themselves (literally, in fact, though don’t expect a sparkling conversation), and Joyride is also quietly lovely, with its sand-scrubbed Phong shaders. In all the hysteria over motion-sensing the strength of Kinect’s supporting hardware, even given that extra 10-15% computational load, has been somewhat forgotten. Remind us, Microsoft.

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