Forza 3 Kinect-able At E3

A tweet from Digital Foundry suggest that Forza 3 will be playable with Kinect on the E3 show floor.

Elephant in the room: no Kinect price point reveal… Playable Forza demo should put paid to “Natal using 30% of CPU time” rumours though.

Racing games are one of those genres where controller lag could be a killer so it will be very interesting to read the views of those who go hands on with this title.

From Microsoft’s E3 press conference it looked like it would be a dumbed-down Forza experience with Kinect as you attempt to overtake an endless stream of slower vehicles.  The head tracking looks mildly interesting though with it giving the player the ability to look towards the mirrors and ‘into’ corners as you approach them.

22 Comments

  1. Will be interesting to see how they get on with it… A 60fps racer will highlight lag like nothing else and the folks at DF are the best people in the world to analyse it.

  2. I dont see ANY fun about taking over a stream of slower vehicles. This seems a huge fail to me of epic proportions.

    Racing head to head against someone else in the room with you could be fun, but I can imagine the game getting confused about who is using which steering wheel.

    They better have more than what they showed at the E3 demo.

    • What? Kinetic does multiplayer, it does drop in split the screen, drop out make it whole again. It fakes into account stray arms and legs near the game area and is mire than capable if recognising a couple of people steering… We’ve seen all if those things so far.

      • Are you drunk?

      • No, are you?

      • You seem to be very defensive of the Natal/Kinetic thing, are you financially involved?

      • Cc is trying to be as fair as possible. Not something that’s easy to do on a PS3-centric site (even though we have 360 articles, etc).

        Thing is, PS3 fans are wailing on the Kinect a bit too vehemently if you ask me. When it comes down to it, Kinect might be flawed from the off (with the lag) but that doesn’t stop us assessing everything MS have to offer to see what it can and can’t do.

        People are making knee-jerk reactions all too often as we get a bit defensive with Sony’s goodness.

    • It’s probably safe to say there is more to it than we saw in a couple of minutes during the press conference.

    • Not with Forza we havent CC_Star, and I think a steering wheel is differnet to trying to hit a bunch of balls or whatever they were flying towards the screen. Put it on a 26 inch screen, two people standing trying to play split-screen … I can imagine many problems in trying to accurately position yourself to hold your steering wheel with no on screen promps when its going to look a lot smaller than it did at E3.

      • We’ve seen no end with a steering wheel from Burnout Paradise a year ago to Joyride earlier as well as loads of multiplayer gaming, also following the industry bids who have had hands-on time today they all seem reasonably impressed with the technical aspects of it, even if some of the games are not to everyone’s tastes

      • Fair enough then. Ill take their word for it until more footage is availiable.

      • But what we havent seen so far cc_star is the accelerator and braking mechanic. I know that we saw boosting in the game shown earlier, but not how the player speeds up and slows down. Does this mean that the game is using auto accelerate/brake? If so then sure its a racing game on rails?

      • We saw them in Natal Burnout, you hit your foot to the floor to accelerate and stuff… didn’t see anything in the demo, other than no discernable steering lag for the brief time they were showing picture in picture.

        I presume Criterion couldn’t carry on work on bringing their Natal Burnout demo to market (because of NFS) so MS had to turn to a closer partner in Turn10

  3. ‘Overtaking a stream of slower vehicles’ sounds like an eighty’s arcade game.

    • Looked like one of a choice of game modes

  4. Am I the only one that sees that the ‘amazing’ virtual car tours were essentially the EyeToy’s ‘hover over button to select’ menu system coupled with some flash cut scenes.

    As for the head tracking in car – wasn’t that announced/leaked for GT5 in August last year? Why does everyone think just because it’s being done with an expensive peripheral and backed with a big marketing budget that it’s revolutionary? Hand gestures, Voice recognition, head tracking – none of this is new and all of it can be done on the PSEye.

    Very little of what was shown made Kinect look worth it, the dancing game was probably the most impressive demo – and that definitely isn’t my cup of tea!!!

    • I thought that too about the virtual car tour but my live feed was a bit jumpy at that point so i wasn’t sure.
      Experience has thought many of us that it’s far quicker and convenient to click a button when we want something rather than hover your outstretched hand for 4 seconds. Instant gratification and all that..

    • Not sure I’ve seen a single PS3 game which features any of those things, even the most basic element, hand gestures is ropey as hell

      • EyeToy Play 3 has the same selection method (well, you’ll have to wave your hand a bit up and down over the button, but it works faster) and multiplayer tracking (4 players, I have only seen 2 player with Kinect so far).

        Obviously the graphics are better, but in EyeToy Play3 you see yourself jumping up and down inside the game (makes it a really good laugh) and it takes pictures while you are playing, just like Buzz among others).

        What they did well though was the social part of it, uploading everything to Facebook from the game is a cool gadget if you are in to that (I can’t be arsed about Facebook, but thats is just me). The videochat looks good too IMO, really slick…

      • Every EyeToy/Eye game I’ve ever played uses that menu system – look at the Xbox stuff again, the cursor was his hand being tracked, he hovered and a circle filled up to confirm the selection. Identical to the EyeToy/Eye only using a cursor rather than camera footage…

  5. This looked so unbelievably poor. Almost as though Microsoft forced them to make a titled to go with Kinect. Utter waste of time.

    • Thank You, I thought the same. It was more like an arcade game where it rely’s on novelty to make you spend £1 a go than anything you’d want to play over and over in your own home. The graphics looked nice on that baby tiger game though, but a shit game that not even kids would play for long. Infact that tiger was just a stand in for that Milo boy thing wasn’t it?

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