Hello, and welcome to the MeFight Club coverage of E3 2010! Tonight was the debut of the final release version of Project Natal, Microsoft’s attempt at making a controller that mandates waving your arms about like a complete loon. We weren’t invited, seeing as this blog is less than a week old, but we figured what better way to kick off our coverage of E3 than with a product announcement we weren’t actually at! Consider this a warm-up for when we can report on things we’ve actually seen and touched for ourselves, instead of having to crib off the reporting of other, more reputable websites. Hit the full page link to read the finest in second-hand impressions.

And the first bit of news is that it’s no longer called Project Natal. The final production name for the device is the Microsoft Kinect, a name that’s more evocative of brightly-colored plastic snap-together building toys than a new method of controlling a game console. This continues the new tradition of game console hardware codenames being far, far better than their final production names that was started by the Nintendo Wii.

Of course, misspelled words masquerading as serious product names wasn’t the real reason for the launch event. The Kinect depends on a 3D camera system and associated software to sense where your body is in three-dimensional space and use that information to allow you control a game without having to wave around a TV remote or brightly-colored balls on sticks. Supposedly, this will usher in a new age where controllers are relegated to the dustbin of history, we will be able to interface with games more naturally than ever before, peace and understanding will overtake the world, the polar ice caps will return and so on. One of the taglines revealed in the press material reads:

No barriers.
No boundaries.
No gadgets.
No gizmos.
No learning curves.

You Kinect, you are the controller.

This will in no way become incredibly annoying almost immediately after the press campaign for Kinect launches.

Of course, this controller-free utopia can only be achieved if there’s games worth playing that use the capabilities, and much like the majority of the games out there that purport to take advantage of the Wii’s motion sensing capabilities, they use the technology more as a gimmick than anything else. There’s the Wii Sports ripoff Kinect Sports, complete with bowling, boxing, table tennis, volleyball, soccer and track and field, Kinect Adventures with whitewater rafting and an obstacle course, which I’m forced to assume is remarkably like the track and field minigame in Kinect Sports, Kinectimals, another virtual pet game, Dance Central, another “spastically flail about in front of your TV in a pale simulacrum of dance that denigrates God and Man alike” game, and Joy Ride, a paid version of that Burnout demo from last E3 where you mimed holding a steering wheel out in front of you to steer about on screen.

Much like with the Wii, there’s a ton of potential in Kinect’s design and function, and also much like the Wii, it seems to be mostly squandered on minigames, instead of using the motion controller to enhance and extend the gaming experience into new realms. I’m not impressed so far, but maybe when I get a chance to check out Kinect for myself on the show floor, it’ll blow me away. Or maybe I’ll just twist my ankle trying to play Dance Central.