Tsunoda loves the Wii, but not that much

Microsoft's Kinect E3 unveiling - complete with an impressive but ultimately head-scratching performance by the world-famous Cirque du Soleil - may have raised more questions than answers but that hasn't stopped the shade-wearing Kudo Tsunoda - Kinect's creative director - from mouthing-off about how fantastic and revolutionary it is.

Speaking at a special Microsoft-organised event during E3, Tsunoda had this to say:

"There is a promise in the Wii that is very hard to deliver in any kind of controller-based stuff. Even their very first E3 demos that came out - and you're playing tennis, and everybody's up and you're going like this and you're playing tennis and it's awesome, look at that!

Anybody who watches those things getting played, you're just sitting here doing your little thing like this [does small movements with wrist]. That's how controller-based games are played.

Nothing against the Wii, because I like playing the Wii, I like Wii games, and it's a great system, but I do think there is some unfulfilled promise there."

When asked if Kinect therefore represented a step up from Nintendo's motion technology, Tsunoda replied:

"I don't really see Kinect so much as a successor to the Wii at all, because there's just so much more that we can do with our technology. Obviously the full body tracking is so much different than tracking two points in your hands of a controller.

Somebody says, well, hey, is it a successor to the Wii, or is it an evolution of the Wii? Not really. If all we did was the full body tracking, and we said, okay well, look, you can do stuff with your hands, but now you can do stuff with your full body...but really Kinect is so much more than that. You have the full body controls, the voice technology, the human recognition stuff.

Not even just talking about the Wii, but where else can you do that in any medium? Really, there's nothing that's delivering that type of experience anywhere in the world."

He certainly has a point, but what was shown during Microsoft's lukewarm E3 keynote did little to reassure gamers that Kinect really is the next big thing.

[source videogamer.com]