Once the avatar is created, though, it’s time to go in game and see how you perform.
We played two sports, since the rest aren’t finished, with a motion-based version of jet-ski racing (like N64’s Waverace, actually) and then a two player rock climbing, with each of these demonstrating how the Kinect has improved.
Over in the jet ski world, turning your racer is no longer made from giant sweeping motions, and while this was necessary on the Xbox 360 Kinect racing games, here on the One, it will just land you in a wall, or exploding as you crash into a ship.
The motion tracking appears to have been tightened dramatically, and as you start the second lap, you begin to realise that Microsoft has made waves (no pun intended) of work and research into refining this.
Another new feature of the Kinect is to pick up on what the fingers are doing, because in the 360, it was simply about hands.
When you play the rock-climbing title, which has you reaching for a rock, letting go of the other, over and over again, you realise quickly that the camera is watching out for the movements of your digits, not just the placement of your hands, all the while tracking your feet, because if you decide to jump, you’ll jump ahead and push your way up the rock face quickly.
The last game we checked out was Capcom’s Dead Rising 3, which promises to let you go on a zombie killing rampage in one of the most entertaining ways you’ve ever dreamed of.
We spoke to the developers of the game, fresh from Capcom’s studios in Canada, who told us that the sheer amount of technology inside the new Xbox console is what is making these games bigger, increasing the size of the titles and also how much they can do.
“The big thing for us on Xbox One has been that we can take the density that Dead Rising is known for with zombies, weapons, items, physics objects – just stuff on screen – and now make a fully streaming open world without sacrificing the density,” said Mike Jones, one of the producers of the new Dead Rising title at Capcom in Canada.
“Previous games we always had to have smaller little environments, we had to partition it with loading zones. Now we’re able to make it fully streaming, we’ve got way more memory budget, more horsepower, and we can make it prettier.”
The result is a zombie game that features more polygons and figures on screen than this writer has ever seen before, with hundreds of zombies all fighting to take a piece of you and lots of little things which you can use as weapons to take a piece of them first.
If you know video games and the sort of hardware requirements that have held back immense amount of activity at once, looking at what Capcom has been able to accomplish with Dead Rising 3 is insanely impressive.
That feeling of being impressed was one that spread to most parts of the Xbox One play that we had, but there was one thing we felt a little bugged about, and that’s the missing backwards compatibility.
When the PS3 came along, there was limited backwards compatibility for the PS2, and then it was killed altogether when it pretty much never worked. At the time the Xbox 360 launched, Microsoft seemed to get the message a little better, providing some more backwards compatibility for original Xbox titles, and rolling this out eventually in the form of online downloads of games.
And yet here in the Xbox One, Microsoft seems to have gone back on its position of understanding the need for compatibility, with Sony offering it in the form of online streaming of older games when the PS4 does arrive.
But there might be a solution, and it’s one that surprised us considerably.
One of the hardware features of the Xbox One is the inclusion of an HDMI input, meaning you can plug another entertainment device into the new Xbox and use it there. Theoretically, this means you could leave your Xbox 360 around, keep it plugged into the Xbox One, and use it when you want to go back to the vast collection of 360 titles that you’ve probably amassed, which is the same boat we’re in.
It’s not perfect, but at least it’s a solution.
Regardless, Microsoft’s Xbox One will be heading to stores in Australia from November 22, 2013, with a recommended retail price of $599.
