A couple of little things in Microsoft's promotional video for Project Natal, its camera-based peripheral that will allow for gamers to play without holding a controller, jumped out at me, but I left them out of my original post on the device.
The video played at last week's E3 (above) was clear to state it was a "product vision" and that "actual features and functionalities may vary." Yet one feature they might want to leave out is the one where a woman turns off her Xbox 360 by saying, "Good night."
Could you imagine the epic suffering this might cause? You're cruising along through "Gears of War 5: Gears for Fears," making headway in an epic battle against some insane, 8-foot-tall Locust dude wielding a Phillips screwdriver gun, when your 3-year-old kid, about to go to bed, yells, "Good night, Daddy!" and your screen goes black. Even worse, anyone who's ever had a sibling can attest to the sadistic glee an 8- to 16-year-old would take in just yelling, "Good night!" every time he or she walked past the Xbox 360. Oh, the horror.
The other thing that stood out was the scene where the kid is skateboarding in his living room, performing tricks on his invisible skateboard by jumping up and down. Wait a minute, I thought. The Xbox 360 has a well-publicized disc-scratching problem. While I'm not willing to subscribe to conspiracy theories that say the console will scratch discs on its own, it does seem that even the slightest movement of the console places spinning discs at risk of being scratched and rendered unplayable. With games costing as much as $60, this is a pretty severe design flaw. A colleague of mine at The Press Democrat had to replace a game disc simply because excited kids jumping around her living room created enough rumbling to ruin a game.
In other words, jumping around and performing tricks mere feet from your Xbox 360 probably isn't going to be the best thing for your game discs. Sure, you can get around the problem by installing the game to your 360's hard drive, but is the average customer going to know to do that? The potential flood of consumer complaints about an issue like this ought to make Microsoft think twice before introducing any motion-controlled games that feature jumping.
Comments | Add Comment
Posted By: Andy (07/06/2009 9:20:01 PM)
Comment: Context, that magical notion that forms the Grand Canyon between computers and psyches...
Posted By: Chris (07/06/2009 11:36:49 AM)
Comment: The horror I see is the web chat that has full length video of the two people. Think about all the perverted teens out there trying to seduce one another. The new wave of video striptease has been born!
Posted By: Pete (07/06/2009 1:00:14 AM)
Comment: First of all Natal has voice recognition so little timmy's voice isn't going to turn off the machine while it's logged into someone elses profile & it will probably have one of those "are you sure you want to turn off" type of a warning that needs to be confirmed by saying yes.
Secondly, i don't know what your house is made of but jumping up and down in my house does not result in anything more than the slight vibration of some ornaments & i have very creaky floorboards, unless you live in a bouncy castle it's not going to jolt the console anywhere near enough to scratch a disc.
If you're talking about jumping around close enough to physically kick the 360 over then i guess you would kind of deserve the consequences, maybe a warning & disclaimer in the manual for American customers?
Response: Aw, lighten up. I was just having some fun. I highly doubt the "good night" to turn off feature will be included when the product ships. That is a good point about voice recognition, however it would still be possible for an inadvertent "goodnight" from whoever's signed in to trigger a shutdown process, or at least the first step. As for the jumping around thing, it's never been a problem with me, personally. But it's certainly an issue that's gotten some coverage online. (And like I said, it affected a coworker of mine.)
Posted By: Chiefbootknocker (07/06/2009 12:38:07 AM)
Comment: Sorry Eric, but I watched the E3 thing on IGN tonight, and as I understand it; the technology will use voice recognition to sign your avitar in. If this is so I suspect that only the person with the main sign-in can say "goodnight". It's kind of like wii where you can have multipal people bowl on wii sports, but the main controller controls getting things started in the menu before you start.
As for disk scratches: I've only had my 360 for about a year, but I have yet to even make a slight mark an a disk, and oh the hours I have logged on Fallout 3.
Response: As I said in my other reply, that's a good point, but I was mostly kidding around. I can imagine older siblings the world over would delight in setting their profile to auto sign-in and then mercilessly toying with younger siblings. Of course, you could argue that's already possible with the 360's one-button-press off switch on the media remote.
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