Saturday, August 27, 2011

Gunstringer Brings out the Kinect's Useful Side

How dedicated am I to this blog ?  After going to bed at 2am from a night of drinking, I am back up at 7am just to bring you more PAX deliciousness.  I wanted to tell you about a game I played last night called the Gunstringer.

With the aide of some alcohol, I played this game for about 15 minutes in the middle of a charity party.  Talking with some of the developers and the promo guys for the game gave me some real insight into the game.  Their goal was to make a game that finally utilized the Kinect in a natural, intuitive way.

The player acts as the marionette for a gun-slinging puppet and guide him through his world.  Player's use the left hand to move the character left and right as well as jumping.  The right hand acts as the reticle of the six-shooter and the actually shooting action.

This game does play really smoothly.  Walking up to it and starting right away is very easy.  The way that the Kinect and the player work together is very intuitive and feels like a natural fit.  Moving the character, gun reticle, shooting, jumping, and more are all fun and seamless.  However, you are required to hold your arms up and out to play the game (think arms like a zombie but not stretched out so far).  Ten minutes into the game, my left arm began to get tired. I imagine that not too much later would have made my right arm tired too.  So while this game really uses the Kinect well, it has the classic problem of expecting players to want to stand in awkward positions for long amounts of time. 

In the end, this game will be worth the money if its released as an arcade game.  But as a full length, $60 game, not so much.  Its definitely fun, but I hope that they come up with some levels in the game to help relieve your arms throughout.

1 comment:

Linz said...

I guess it's one way to get us to work out, even just a little bit.. right? Trying to look at it positively lol