MotionSports, by Ubisoft, is yet another of the inevitable slew of mini-game compilations that seems predestined to arrive in the wake of Microsoft’s new motion control peripheral<\/p>\n
Let it never be said that Motion Sports suffers from a lack of variety. There are six types of sports to choose from; Hang-gliding, Skiing, American Football, Horseback Riding, Football and the always popular Boxing. Each activity starts with a single event being available, and as the player progresses, additional events are unlocked. The events start out fairly simple; a basic course for your first Horse ride, a small and straight forward course for Hang-gliding and a simple penalty shootout for football There is however no real indication of a player’s progress toward unlocking the next event. Yes, the medals awarded are an indication, but some sort of progress bar would have gone a long way to easing the casual gamer in.<\/p>\n
The events depicted are also not true representations of the sports they are based on. I was not aware that in Down Hill Skiing the skier needed to collect a series of bronze, silver and gold floating stars? This may seem a trivial point but when one looks at the demographic Ubisoft was aiming for with its more realistic visuals and more “serious” sports feel, but it starts to smell of a poor design choice. Collecting stars would have perfectly natural in a cartoony title such a Kinect Sports, but it seems out of place in Motion Sports.<\/p>\n
The bad design choices don’t end with this. As mentioned earlier, some of the actual sports included in this compilation seemed obscure. Let me explain: Kinect’s major selling point is that is turns the player’s body into the controller, so one would expect the kind of activities that require the body to be in an active or semi active state. In Horseback riding the player shakes his arms, as one would with a real pair of reins to control direction and speed. Pull the virtual reins left or right to steer the pony and pull back to make it stop. When an obstacle is approached the player does a little hop and my little pony jumps over said obstacle. That is the extent of the player activity during this particular sport. <\/p>\n
In hang-gliding the player controls the pitch and roll of the glider with only his or her out stretched arms; leaning either left or right to turn. Lift up the out stretched arms to gain some altitude at the cost of speed or drop them to head into a dive which adds speed but obviously lowers the player’s altitude. Neither of these events truly make the player feel active or that they’re involved in something that is supposed to be exciting. Even American Football, which is a sport known for its physical nature, has the avatar on a rail, moving along while the player simply dodges, ducks and jumps over obstacles. This could be done with a Wiimote or a Move Wand, but it seems terribly lacking when one looks at what is possible with Kinect.<\/p>\n
Perhaps these activities would have impressed me more had Motion Sports actually detected my motions properly. In the American Football mini-game the player needs to jump over low obstacles and crouch under high ones. Apparently ducking is optional, and in my six attempts the on screen avatar ducked maybe twice, the rest of the time he smacked his head happily into the obstacle. In the Football penalty shoot out the player needs to place the ball before being able to shoot which is done by bending, at the hips, and “placing” the ball. If this wasn’t an idiotic enough mechanic to include in the first place, the fact that to get the game to register the motion the player needs to basically lay flat on the floor like he or she is sneaking up on the goalie. Then once the game decides to finally put the ball on the ground, kicking becomes the next hurdle to overcome, as it may take three or so kicks to actually send the ball on its merry way. <\/p>\n
Boxing is another example of a well thought out concept ruined by the sheer unresponsiveness of the game’s controls. Not only is there a noticeable delay between the act of punching and the on screen equivalent, but sometimes it fails to register the action completely and during these “dud” punches the player’s guard is obviously down (he\/she was on the attack after all), resulting in the the AI punching your lights out.<\/p>\n
Motion Sports is easy on the eyes, if not particularly visually appealing. It is nice to see a mini-game compilation move away from cartoonish representations of the player. Yes it is humorous to see my ODST Armor clad Avatar doing windmill arms during the slow-motion replay of my last 50m sprint in Kinect Sports, but MotionSports’ more realistic visual style gives an impression of a more serious sports title. It is sad then that the character models are a bit rough around the edges and the animations are almost robotic in their execution, not smooth, flowing movements.Lack of memorable music and the frequently repeated, unoriginal commentary only add to MotionSports inadequacies.<\/p>\n
The menu interface did get a few things right though. For instance, placing all the selectable options on a grid across the screen helps the player orientate themselves. Similarly a snap-to feature, which pulls the onscreen cursor to the center of the nearest selectable option, helps the selection process as it eliminates the need to hold your arms perfectly over the button to get started . The slide bar continue mechanism is also a welcome change from the usual simple button approach; whenever the player needs to perform an action to continue, a small block will appear in the bottom middle of the screen, the player then simply reaches for it and slides it left to right to continue. Unfortunately the hit or miss tracking mechanics appear even here. <\/p>\n
Closing Comments<\/strong><\/p>\n MotionSports seems to have stepped squarely into that all so familiar launch title trap; rushed production. The lack of polish and poor controls turns what could have been an interesting, although derivative, launch title for Kinect, into a frustrating, easily forgettable experience. <\/p>\n The Kinect’s critics might say that the control issues could be a problem with the hardwar – this simply isn’t the case. Neither Kinect Adventures nor Kinect Sports (the other sports mini-game compilation) suffer from this issue. Sure there are times when Kinect may not always register a movement correctly, but at least it registers. If you are looking for a few fun party games to show off your Kinect next time a some friends come over, MotionSports is not what you are looking for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ubisoft\u2019s Mini-Game Compilation Strikes out<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}