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Fighting With Your Fingers — A Canceled Indie Game Concept For Natal
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Though Microsoft's Project Natal won't be released until later this year, indie studio Arkedo has already revealed a canceled project for the peripheral. Called 2 Finger Heroes, it was to be a beat 'em up where your fingers do the fighting. 'Characters would be controlled by moving your fingers, while special moves could be done by incorporating your whole hand. The environment could even be affected by moving your arms folded at your chest.' On why it was canceled, one of the developers said, 'One of the design flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities...'"
No wonder it was canceled, it sounds way too much like the title of a movie I could only download from The Pirate Bay after logging in.
Are localizations for downloadable games -really- that important? Usually people who download games from a different region generally know what to expect in the game. I can see localization being an issue for high-budget games, but for low budget indie games, its more or less just another expense. How many of us have played J-RPGs that have been "localized" and made terrible either by censorship or by forcing us to listen to sub-par English voice actors?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The solution here is pretty obvious. Collect all of the most offensive and rudest gestures known to man and make them the only way to play the game. Not only will it sell the game just by itself, you'll advance the art of obscene gesturing immeasurably, giving it a global sophistication and sensibility the field desperately needs.
Not trying to troll here, but from the article and the dev's forum post it doesn't seem that this game actually got any development time. If a game only gets 12 days of concept work put into it, and no actual game code or art assets, is it really news if it gets "cancelled?" By that definition, any game studio brainstorming ideas for a new game "cancels" multiple projects before settling on one they like.
Devs: Okay we have this game concept for Natal where you wiggle your fingers around and control the game. Natal claims its that precise so there will be no problem right?
MS: Hahah we say a lot of crazy shit don't we? Now about this game, would it change the mechanics much if instead of wiggling fingers players had to stand in clear view of the camera and wave their arms in exaggerated flailing motions?
Devs: Erm it might
MS: Well maybe the player could sit on the couch and make retarded steering wheel motions.
Devs: Okay...
MS: And you say this is a fighting game? How critical is responsiveness and precision?
Devs: Very, it's a fighting game.
MS: We got you covered. We've got latency down to 250ms. Of players have to make spastic flailing actions which adds to that time but that's not our fault is it? And precision is a very respectable 80%. The other 20% of the time it ignores you or does some other action. Just map 4 or 5 motions onto generic fighting moves and you'll be fine.
Devs: Perhaps we'll forget the whole idea.
MS: Well if you do go ahead, here's a hand sign for you - Gangsta!
It seems it's more like 1cm. Here are Prime Sense sensor (which reportedly licensed by Microsoft) specs:
Field of View (Horizontal, Vertical, Diagonal) 58 H, 40 V, 70 D
Depth image size VGA (640x480)
Spatial x/y resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor) 3mm
Depth z resolution (@ 2m distance from sensor) 1cm
Maximum image throughput (frame rate) 60fps
Operation range 0.8m - 3.5m
Color image size UXGA (1600x1200)
And here is tech description
what can be understood as the victory sign in France...
France has a sign for victory?!