One theme which has repeated across entire decades of the story of the UK’s #1 charting games is the adaptability and appeal of Star Wars. So many genres have had a rare or first glimpse at the top in Star Wars form. FMV rail shooters, first person shooters, Western RPGs, massive combat simulators, the one where they’re all made of Lego. Star Wars can add appeal to almost anything. Even when it’s a bit further back in trend-hopping, like coming to futuristic racing games four years after Wipeout, that can work out too. So it’s with a sense of inevitability rather than surprise that I come to Kinect Star Wars, the first #1 game centred on Microsoft’s motion control peripheral.
Essentially a fancier version of EyeToy with added voice control, Microsoft launched Kinect in 2010 to strong initial success. I got one and had a reasonable time with Kinect Adventures!, which was also very much a fancier version of EyeToy: Play, although without anything as inventive as its image-flipping Mirror Time. Kinect also added the use of Xbox’s customisable personal avatars, which helped the experience but were inescapably a less charming version of Nintendo’s Miis.
Soon my partner switched out Just Dance for Kinect’s Dance Central, a better prospect for the better dancer. In 2011 I played Child of Eden, a motion-controlled abstract shoot-em-up and successor to Rez, which synced up its movements to pop music. It felt as much like the future unexpectedly crashing into the present as Wii Sports had five years earlier. After that, not only did I find nothing else comparable, I didn’t play anything else new on Kinect at all.
Kinect Star Wars does not offer much in the way of new uses of Kinect. Instead, as with so many of the previous examples, the appeal is in putting a Star Wars skin over an established approach. Or, rather, an established set of approaches, from dance game to racer to various exercises in limb-placement. Despite my living room being bigger than the one I had in 2010, I quickly hit on the first problem, thanks to the TV facing across the shorter dimension of the rectangle. Kinect spends half the time telling me to step further back, and I can’t.
This helped the pod-racing mode to be my favourite because it doesn’t do that, but it is probably the best in technical terms as well. You hold your arms in front of you and move them forward to speed up and to each side to turn. It’s logical and it works. The game uses it in a reasonable estimation of the then-13-year-old Star Wars Episode I: Racer, complete with sense of speed, which is not a bad goal. It does do things like have the commentary excitedly say “it’s boost versus boost!” when I was using said boost from half a lap down, but if that’s the worst kind of obvious fault it’s a good sign.
Then there is the main event, the Destiny mode. This has you as a Jedi trainee helping to fend off an incoming assault, guided by an awful-sounding Yoda and assorted characters I wasn’t familiar with. The problems become clear right from the initial training, as the various gesture controls respond with frustrating inconsistency and unpredictability. The game takes this into account in about the best way it can from there, which is to make dancing on the spot with random arm and leg movements a pretty viable approach to winning its combat. Rancor Rampage mode, with you as a monster, is basically the same, but with the random flailing openly being the idea.
Destiny mode opens up Duels of Fate, a dedicated lightsaber battling mode. At this point it’s worth comparing the functionality of the Kinect to its obvious predecessor. The Wii controller is shaped like a lightsaber hilt, and the Wii is good at measuring precise movements and turns of the controller in your hand, like those you might make when wielding a lightsaber. The Kinect is good at tracking movements of your limbs and your body, but doesn’t do so well on the smaller scale turns and twists of any of those. Lightsaber duels are in fact almost perfectly designed to show off all the comparative weaknesses of the Kinect and none of its strengths. As the most iconic bit of Star Wars, though, they’re in, and work as badly as expected.
This leaves a mode taking advantage of Kinect’s biggest strengths, the Galactic Dance Off. Essentially, it’s Dance Central with a Star Wars skin. Dance Central needs music, and pop music is the easiest choice, so it provides some pop music with a Star Wars skin. Most (in)famously, this includes taking Jason Derulo’s then-recent “Ridin’ Solo” and making it “I’m Han Solo” complete with Han smiling and dancing and lyrics like “I’m so happy the carbonite is gone”. This is quite funny, in an obvious kind of way, but it met with enough disapproval that people were still writing articles about it much later.
More jaw-dropping to me is “Hologram Girl”, with a similarly off-model Princess Leia in her bikini and dancing to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”, except it’s about… pod-racing? It has “Ooh, this my ship” and “S-E-B-U-L-B-A”. Whatever “I’m Han Solo” was doing, it cranks up to 11. The best reason I can think of that it wasn’t the one which became a meme is that inflicting indignities on Star Wars’ female characters was already too built in to be worth noticing.
Thoughts of dignity bring us onto the worst thing about Kinect Star Wars. Everything is introduced through a distancing framing in which C-3PO and R2-D2 lead us through corrupted archives. C-3PO cringes at just about everything within, especially the dancing, robbing the game even of confidence in its own ideas. Which is quite weird. Kinect Star Wars is not good, but neither was Rebel Assault or Revenge of the Sith, and neither of those felt the need to apologise for their own existence. It’s not like doing so even worked! If anything, it just helped to empower the fans unwilling to entertain the possibility of anything related to their decades-old series exploring new ideas. We’re going to have plenty of opportunities to see where that leads to.
Top of the charts for week ending 7 April 2012:
Top of the charts for week ending 14 April 2012:
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