I went to hang out with Jason last night. We talked about my clock idea some; he gave me some good ideas for how to make it simpler to actually build. Simple is good; simple means it’s more likely to happen.
We also visited the comic shop in his neighborhood; they bought two copies of Rita. So far my track record with comic shops is pretty good – out of the four shops I’ve visited, two have bought two copies outright, one has two on consignment, and one wasn’t interested. (And yeah, I’m still working on getting ready to ship the Kickstarter copies. Working through signing them, I really need to go out for some mailing supplies and make that happen.)
And then I got a chance to play Child of Eden. With the Kinect. Child of Eden, if you don’t know, is the sequel to Rez, which is definitely somewhere in my list of Best Videogames Ever. And it turns out that after a little initial awkwardness, gesture control is perfect for it – by the end of the first level, I was racking up 8-shot combos left and right on my very first runthrough; when playing with a controller, it takes QUITE a lot more practice and memorization to know what’s coming and what the best movement patterns for it are. Sadly I don’t think a Kinect is really going to work in my current setup; if I stand up, I’m standing right in the beam of the projector.
The one thing that’s kind of disappointing in CoE is that it feels a lot less musical than the original. Rez was very much about synching up with the rhythm of the music and knowing that stuff is going to appear and get targeted on the beat; CoE still coerces your actions to the beat a little but it’s not a driving force of the game like it was in Rez. And that feels like a real loss when you’re already standing up; I want to have an extra urge to DANCE while playing it.
(Also there are some problems inherent with gesture control – scratching your nose is a bad idea, for instance, as it sends your cursor flying around wildly.)