CNet correspondent, Ina Fried, had a chance to try Natal and seemed to like it. Gameplay is shown rather well and clearly in this video, have a look )
Transcript:
I’m Ina Fried with CNet news. I’m here in Redmond Washington where I’m getting a very unique opportunity. I’m getting to try out Microsoft’s Project Natal which is the video game controller. I’m here with Kudo who is one of the key head designers of the project.
This is a prototype, is just like a 3d Breakout. I’m gonna smack the ball, getting it towards the hall to break the bricks. I’ll show you how it works. You can see any movement that I make with my body is instantly done by my avatar. I move my arms – the avatar moves its arms. I move my legs – the avatar moves its legs. So there we go. You can see, I can use my arm, I can kick it with my feet, I can use my head. I can just block it with my body. Any part is wired … so you can use it to control the ball. Sure it’s superfun to watch me playing but I think the best thing is get in and check it out yourself. So you wanna pump it?
And again so, you can only stand in one place, you can also move side to side as well. As you’ve noticed when you’ve stepped in … there’s no any calibration step. It’s just as soon as I got out and you stepped in … and play it right away. You’re doing a really good job.
We’ve got one more demo to show you. So this demo, we actually didn’t build for Natal from the ground up. We just wanted proof of concept on the early stage of the project. We really wanted to show we’re not going to have any problems with … lags in the control. Try it yourself. We chose a racing game, which is actually “Burnout Paradise”, so something that has already been released. And a racing game which had any delay in the control input is gonna go off really fast because you’re travelling at high speed. Right? So I’ll just show you how this one works. You just bring your hand to grab the steering wheel, move your foot forward to step on the gas and move your arm for driving. But you know we talked about the accessibility of control. It’s the kind of thing even a little kid who knows how cars are driven can grab in the wheel and turn with the wheel. And this is the kind of thing you like to figure out with XBox 360 controller how you drive a car is never gonna make sense. But this is totally obvious it’s just like driving actual car.
– So I’m on the run, on side of the road. I’m not driving, I’m moving forward.
– Pretty fast, darling. You’re driving really well. But does the steering controls feel like just when you turn in there’s align to your turns?
– Definitely!
– A little hard for me to gas-brakes but again that makes me more to user …
– I think you can feel like, oh, there you go, as you’re playing you’re getting better with the game as well?
– As much as I ever do. It’s certainly really very natural. You know I had no training. Whatsoever. It’s very intuitive. All right so I think I got the idea.
Cnet News, I’m Ina Fried.
