Archive for the ‘project natal’ Category

Yoga Natal game appears on GAME retailer’s Xbox 360 release schedule

Time for some more salacious prognostications about the future, courtesy of the wily folks over at vg247. The team there claims to have obtained internal documents from UK video game retailer GAME that lists the release dates for forthcoming Xbox 360 titles. The listing is headlined by new iterations of Crysis, Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid, but the highlight for us gadget junkies is at the very end: Yoga Natal, scheduled for an October release. Now, even if this doc comes straight from the horse’s mouth, game release dates are notoriously prone to fluctuation, so let’s not read too much into that October date. What’s intriguing is that Microsoft does indeed seem intent on creating specialist games for its Natal experience, and it may be that they’ll all include Natal in their titles to make compatibility abundantly clear. Or this may be just a big bad April 1-related hoax, we’ll live either way.

[Thanks, Matt R.]

Yoga Natal game appears on GAME retailer’s Xbox 360 release schedule originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 03:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fable 3 to utilize Natal, says Molyneux

The Fable 3 announcement had creator Peter Molyneux saying he was throwing away the “foundation stone” of RPGs. Yeah, I thought, you’ve been saying that kind of thing for 20 years now buddy. Show me the money. And in a pleasant surprise, it looks like he may actually be doing that; he confirmed today that the game will use the Natal motion controller, which makes him probably the technology’s biggest on-the-record developer. He already hinted that this was the case, but now it seems that Microsoft is giving the go-ahead for making official announcements.

I can only speculate on the variety of sordid acts you’ll be performing with this thing. Dancing to impress the villagers? Throwing bottles at dragons? Impregnating your wife? The possibilities, I’m sure Molyneux will tell you, are many and various.

Will Project Natal be anything more than a glorified tech demo? Here’s hoping!

Maybe I’m speaking for the minority here, but I have to get this off my chest: Project Natal is sorta “meh,” no? I attended Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Awards for a few minutes last night, and they had on display Project Natal. It was that paint-throwing game. Now, I know that’s just a tech demo, but I left feeling a little concerned about its future.

Now, it’s no secret that I’m an old school gamer who’s both afraid and annoyed by excessive change. I never bought a Wii for that very reason: I really don’t fancy flailing around like a fool when all I want to do is play a round or two of Street Fighter or whatever. (Admittedly, the Wii is fine for party situations when you’re all making fools of yourselves, and it’s about atmosphere more than anything else.) And while Natal—which always reminds me of Christmas for some reason—definitely gives off the initial, “Oh, that’s neat!” feeling, I really can’t see myself playing an entire adventure game using it.

At the event was Natal, of which we were not allowed to take photos or video of, and a bunch of other inventions and whatnot that I can’t remember right now. I hung around for a hot 20 minutes, and the Natal demo was the same one that was shown at E3. You know, the one where you move your on-screen avatar to throw paint and whatever. And hey, it worked as advertised: you move your arm this-a-way and your avatar moves right along with you. It’s damn near 1:1.

So again, the tech behind Natal is great. I’m just worried about the implementation.

How many Wii games do you know that made real, clever use of the controller? How many shooters have tried to replicate the precision of a mouse and keyboard by having you move the controller in 3D space? What’s going to make Natal so different? At the very least it’s going to be a little while before we see the project’s Super Mario 64, something so radically different, if not radically better, than what preceded it.

I don’t know, I’m rambling here, and lost my point several sentences ago. I guess I can boil it down to this: Yes, hooray for Natal and the underlying technology, because, yeah, it’s pretty damn amazing, I’m just having a hard time seeing it develop into anything more than a glorified tech demo. How would you play a Halo or Tekken with it?