Dan

The problem with innovation is that people can only understand a product in terms of other products. In particular everyone is just assuming Natal will be another Eyetoy. The advantage of Natal is that it does all the heavy lifting in terms of processing an image (with the addition of depth information for each pixel) and turns it into a 3d skeleton. Therefore developers only have to deal with -that- level of abstraction.
The problem with the eyetoy or the Wii is that the level of abstraction is "Here's an image, figure it out" or "Here's some accelerometer info, figure it out." This makes it difficult to develop reasonably complicated games.
When a developer can work with something he's familiar with, ie a skeleton in 3d space, then you get big name companies making quality games.
Point is, Natal has tons of potential and its absurd to lump it into the category of a gimmick.

I played this at PAX, and it wasn't really that great. It was extremely chaotic, there were these annoying platforms that players tipped by tipping their wiimotes, and the game paused for a second every time someone got a mushroom or died. It may seem like a little thing, but having it happen every 15-30 seconds was maddeningly frustrating.

22,000 words is cool, but unfortunately a large amount of words are obviously just doodads that they threw in there that have the same properties/graphics of like 100 other things. A lot of them are just dissapointing, like spawning an RC car then trying to use a remote control to control it. No dice.

That being said, there are still plenty of words which are hilarious and fun.

Try spawning God and then an Atheist beside him.

As a game, it's so so. You can usually brute force your way through puzzles by just spawning God to kill everything and then just rocket shipping around. The best way to play is to impose self restrictions like "only things starting with T". Hilarity ensues.

I sincerely hope that the 3d positional processing is occurring in the peripheral itself. This thing already has a slim chance of making it into fully-fledged games, let alone if the console had to sacrifice significant processing power just to drive the controller.

I get the impression that you're a PS3 fanboy, but honestly I can barely decipher what you're even trying to say. Where was a new xbox system mentioned in the article?

Gamers have been getting around this by creating their own in-game gadgetry. If you look on youtube there are a bunch of music levels people have made.

My personal favourite is "Little Big Mario Theme", probably because I made it.
It's a giant music wheel, and it rocks.

Sadly most of the market is knobheads, and a low production value game will not sell regardless.

I have no idea what sort of logic you're using there, but by buying this game and not the DLC you're just not paying for a feature that you obviously don't want.

I don't think people realize the reason they charge for features that "should have been included in the game". The fact is that the production costs for video games are skyrocketing yet it's still unacceptable to release a game that's significantly over $60. Adding versus to a game requires a lot of development time. I don't care how much you 'think' you know about game development, any feature like that is going to cost a fair chunk of change. If they don't think that adding that feature will increase their revenue from the game enough to justify it, then they won't include it. This allows them to get around the issue by allowing people who want the feature to pay for it, rather than jacking up the price.
It's really a double standard. We'll yell at companies for releasing games with crap graphics, then we turn around and yell when they try and charge us more.

I wonder if the controls will be changed at all for the Xbox. Point and click adventure games don't lend themselves too well to being played with a joystick.

It'd be pretty awesome if you could just plug in a mouse to the 360, but I'm not even certain if that level of hardware support is given to developers.

Yeah okay, while shopping for 360 games are you going to pick the one with 1080p, full dolby digital surround sound and rocking gigglebytes of polygons, or the one that looks like they made a Wii game and made it run on the 360?

When you develop for the Wii, the bar is pretty low, so its not that hard to make something that looks (graphically) like all the other games.