One of the figures responsible for developing such titles is Kudo Tsunoda, general manager of Microsoft Game Studios. As part of our Kinect cover feature in issue 218 of Edge (available from UK newsagents tomorrow), we spoke to him about the rumours regarding Kinect's inability to track seated or prone figures, how Microsoft intend to court Nintendo's userbase and what Kinect can do for your love life.
Let's draw a line under the issue of playing Kinect games while seated.
You can do stuff standing up, you can do stuff sitting down, it just depends on the experience. It's tailored around what gives the users the best experience. Also, if you look at a lot of the entertainment orientated stuff we do on Live, like allowing you to be able to control movies with your voice, or being able to scroll through movies using gestures - a lot of that stuff makes watching movies or listening to music a lot more accesible on our console.
The exceptionally cute Kinectimals
How about if the player is lying down?
In the E3 Kinnectimals demo, the little girl who was demoing the game on stage actually does a move where she gets the animal to play dead by lying down on the ground and lifting her arms and legs up in the air. There aren't many occasions in sports where you want to be laying down on the ground, but in Kinectimals you do and the developer was able to put that in.
How will you be updating the standard development tools?
Kinect is just like any other part of the platform: we're always updating developer tools so they can build different kinds of content. One of the great things about Kinect is how many different people are coming up with interactive entertainment ideas and things that they want to do on Xbox around the technology. As people get into developing content they're going to come up with new stuff to do with Kinect, and we'll fold that back into the platform.
The physically tiring Kinect Adventures
Blitz have said they want to develop and sell middleware for the platform, is that something you welcome?
Obviously there are a lot of game engines for existing types of games right now - Unreal is a great engine, and lots of people use it to help make great games on the 360. If there's software out there that will help creative people make Kinect experiences, that's great stuff.
Could you give us an idea what proportion of Microsoft Game Studios has been devoted to Kinect?
It isn't just work that goes on in the Xbox group - it's also the hardware teams working on the unit, and the platform and software teams who make the software for the hardware to work. It takes an enormous amount of time to develop things like the full body tracking, voice recognition and human identification that can sign people into Xbox live. On top of that you have all the game teams as well, and we worked a great deal with the Microsoft research group too. To launch something of this scale there is a big commitment - not just from the Xbox group, but from other parts of the company.