E3 2009: Project Natal: Reaction

Project Natal is, undeniably, awesome, awesome technology. Awesome. But raid your memory banks and go back to 2005, when the Wii was announced. The games industry’s collective jaw hit the floor, and it stayed there until well after its launch a few years ago.

But after a while, we started to look past the whole idea of ‘Ha! Look, there’s a cartoon me playing baseball with a cartoon Hitler’, and we saw the major, major flaw in Ninty’s console: the lack of capability for serious games.

Now, we’ve got a new piece of technology, which takes the basic principles of the Wii to a whole new level. But that main problem is still there. It’s all very well and good messing around with interactive paint and socialising with virtual people, but eventually, we gamers are going to want to play Halo. Unfortunately, I can’t think of any way in which the motion capture would translate well into a serious game controller.

And this leads me to a very worrying idea. Is this the future of gaming? Interactive Breakout? Are we going to end up with Natal Forza and Halo: Natal? That’s not evolved combat, that’s a major step backwards.

Increasingly, it seems that developers are more interested in increasing their fan base among the very young and the old. The Wii has been lauded as having introduced legions of new gamers to the industry. But it has also been praised because it has helped people suffering from disabilities and medical conditions, or people rehabbing from injuries. And I don’t mean to be insensitive, but Project Natal is not as good as the Wii for that. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.

I have grave concerns about Natal. Not only because of the wider impact on what sort of games on which developers spend their money or because it might cost more than the actual console, but also because I have a gut feeling it simply won’t work. At the Microsoft press conference at E3 yesterday, it looked glitchy. If it doesn’t work as perfectly as the videos and trailers showed, this could be very embarrassing for Microsoft. At E3, when showing off their new games, devs shy away from trailers and actually play a level in front of the cameras. This is because Sony showed a trailer of the original Killzone at E3 few years ago. Had the game been as good as the vid suggested, it would have been amazing. But it wasn’t. If Natal goes down the same route, this could be even more damaging for Microsoft than Killzone was for Sony. Only time will tell. It could be the greatest innovation in video gaming history; it could be a laughable failure.