Why I Won't Be Getting A Kinect At Launch

If you've been following my column on SlashGear, you know that I'm a pretty serious gamer. In fact, I'd say that I'm about as hardcore as they come. Aside from the fact that I've been playing games for longer than I choose to remember, I have real and abiding love for everything from role-playing games to sports games. There hasn't been a single genre that I haven't at one time or another loved.

That love of games has helped me become completely console agnostic. No matter the hardware a game is playing on, I will play it. Unlike so many other gamers, I don't care that Nintendo makes too many kid-friendly games, or that Microsoft is Microsoft. When it comes to consoles, I love them all with reckless abandon.

But when Microsoft releases its Kinect motion-gaming peripheral, which allows players to control all on-screen action with their bodies, rather than with the help of a controller, I won't be in line to pick one up. Yes, I've heard that the technology works well. And for $150, its price is just fine. But I've been burned too many times by motion gaming. And I'm unwilling to fall into that trap again.

I recently bought the PlayStation Move. The technology, like the Wii, allows gamers to control titles by holding the Move controller and waving their hands around. It's an experience that works better than the Wii, but like Nintendo's motion gaming, it falls flat for me.

I found the experience of playing games with Move quite boring. And like the Wii, it requires far too much effort to do far too little. It makes it even more obvious that I'm not really doing what my character on the screen is, even though the goal is to make it seem that way.

I'm starting to believe that I will have a similar experience with the Kinect. Sure, it's a unique implementation of motion control, but it's the same basic premise, isn't it? I simply move around and next thing you know, the character on the screen mimics those movements. No more, no less.

Maybe I'm becoming rather "old school" in my thinking or I just haven't played the right game, but in every motion-gaming case, I've been disappointed. And I'm just not willing to drop an additional $150 on a technology that, when it's all said and done, will probably disappoint me, as well.

Call me crazy, but I'm perfectly content playing a game with the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controller. I'm also quite happy playing a Wii game holding the Remote sideways like a traditional controller.

I'm just one of those folks that likes to relax and enjoy games the old-fashioned way.

Who's with me?