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Over at Platform Nation, Mitchel Broussard wrote an article discussing his griefs and nuisances with Microsoft’s newest motion-sensing technology.

After consumers have had their hands on Kinect for a bit of time, I think most users generally fall into this method of thinking. Paraphrased, Mitchel mentions that the Kinect technology is under-developed and more of a gimmick than it leads people to believe.

Kinect, for those of you that don’t know, relies on a camera to detect body movements as controller inputs. You can use Kinect in the main menu of the Xbox 360 and in games that support it, even opening Netflix with it, but there are some implied ground-breaking developments that might just end up costing more money than they are worth.

Consider this. Mitchel notes that first or third-party peripherals for the Kinect technology may end up wasting money and space for storage. He shows an inflatable “Game Boat” which states on the package that it is “Ideal for Kinect Adventures”. The real question is, no matter how fun or even amazing a game could possibly be with an inflatable boat add-on, how much would it cost, but more importantly, how many games will be released in the future with “Wii-like” peripherals that take up space, time, and effort to setup before playing? Going to play a tennis game? Why not pick up a tennis racket peripheral. Going to play a boxing game? What about boxing gloves? The potential to sell a product, a video game, without bundled peripherals to enhance gameplay means that the end-consumer would need to possibly shell out more and more money to get the “full experience”.

Mitchel rants a bit further, and his comments about single and multiplayer experiences with kinect are pretty strong. If you want to play a single-player game, you must be at least 6 feet away from the camera for it to be able to accurately detect motion input. If you want to play multiplayer, you’re looking at a minimum of 8 feet that both you and your partner must place yourselves from the camera. This begs the question, how many users have that much room in their “gaming area”? Not everyone, that’s for sure.

So just how practical is Kinect? I’m a bit on the fence about this personally, but leave a comment and let us know what you think!

[Source: Platform Nation]

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So the folks at Gamrfeed have published a few nice charts showing the sales numbers from ‘07-’10 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii. More interesting than those numbers, perhaps, are the market share numbers.

Truthfully, the Playstation 3 is beginning to see better days. We already know that Sony expects the Playstation 3 to be a 10-year console, but I’m not too sure even Sony is convinced of that after giving these charts a once-over. Very interesting stuff!

Since the charts aren’t the best when uploaded to Wordpress, make sure to click the source link if you’re interested in seeing theirs.

[Source: Gamerfeed]

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