Embedding's been disabled, so you'll just have to go here for proof.

Yes, Gang of Four, they of the angular post-punk, have been co-opted for Microsoft's Kinect marketing. Couple this with the fact that Microsoft is spending $1 billion (you read that right) on competing with Nintendo and Apple (with their Windows Live Phone), and you have Microsoft focusing almost entirely on shoving as many Kinects into as many homes as they can.

The Gang of Four thing is mostly just me being a curmudgeon; what really gets my goat, though, is the cynicism of Microsoft's strategy. Seeing who was the big buyer of the Wii, they're content to go exclusively after that market, and are being completely shameless about it. Oprah and Ellen appearances, Cirque du Soleil performances, the whole shebang – it's frankly a little embarrassing. Whereas Nintendo has said that motion controlling is for everyone (and even games that aren't motion controlled all run through the Wii remote), MS is clearly delineating: Kinect = stuff the Wii did four years ago (and has generally moved away from recently), controller = killing zombies/terrorists/Nazis.

Don't get me wrong, I am unreasonably excited for the potential of the Kinect. Things like Child of Eden and Suda 51's Kinect game excite me greatly, but there's no support for this peripheral outside of a few weird Japanese developers, and that almost certainly means it's going to be relegated to being the kind of novelty item it's always threatened to be. Add in the fact that you need three metres of uninterrupted space to play the thing, and it just seems like such a boondoggle (it certainly won't work in my apartment, anyways).

Trying to keep an open mind about this thing is getting increasingly difficult.

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