Games Revue

Check out this E3 video of microsoft’s revolutionary new control scheme for the Xbox – project Natal aims to replace controllers completely by optical recognition systems that track your body directly, without the need to use any controller at all!

The demo is impressive, and the possibilities are mind blowing, though it’s still hard to tell just how workable the system will be in reality, small delays could make certain games unworkable, and one has to wonder if they really expect gamers to fight against Chun Li and Ryu with their actual bodies. Are you able to do a high kick? I am, but I certainly can’t do a spinning tornado kick… will this mean more realistic martial arts games?

Space considerations are also a factor, the family in the video has a really big living room, the likes of which I’ve very rarely seen even in nice houses. Remember all the incidents of people hitting each other with the wii controller? I imagine this is going to be the same times two, with people kicking their TV in by mistake in a moment of passion.

One possibility that comes to mind for this technology is the use for easy inexpensive home motion capture, allowing people to become animators with no effort at all. This is potentially game changing for social applications if the tools are provided and marketed right.

Here’s a fairly amazing demo from Alternativa 3d showing their 3d in-a browser technology. The nicest thing about it is it runs via flash, straight on your browser without having to muck around installing programs or plugins.

While I don’t enjoy the idea that gimmicky flash websites might become even more gimmicky, the possibilities are, like they say, endless.

This demo video for the new upcoming game Fez shows it’s new revolutionary game mechanic, while at first it appears to be a standard 2d platformer, you can later move around in a 3d world, but the trick is you can switch back to 2d and move in a flat world to reach places that aren’t linearly connected, much like a M.C. Escher painting in movement.

Fez is a finalist of the independent game awards festival

The new Alone in the Dark is set to have an amazing array of interactive options for your player to modify the scenery in creative ways, check out this demo version to see how you can break objects apart, pick up pieces, light them on fire, tip over objects, control them with fine detail, etc…

Alone in the Dark

An awesome little virtual reality in a box

Demo video of new conceptual game ‘levelHead’ by Julian Oliver.

Using tilt motions, the player moves a character through rooms that appear inside one of several cubes on a table. Each room is logically connected by a series of doors, though some doors lead nowhere (they are traps).

The player has 2 minutes to find the exit of each cube, leading the character into the entrance of the next..

Work is also being done to use invisible markers such that the cube itself appears entirely white to the naked eye.