Call in airstrikes without a single button press.
Microsoft is heavily promoting the use of its Kinect technology in games that might not otherwise use it. Gamers playing Mass Effect or Madden NFL are too busy actually using the controller to flail about madly, but their voices are otherwise unoccupied. We first caught a glimpse of how using Kinect’s voice features to order squadmates might work in Mass Effect 3, but the functionality is greatly expanded in the titles being demonstrated at this year’s E3 2012.
Superspy Sam Fisher is back in Splinter Cell Blacklist, now as the big man in charge of Third Echelon. He and his team are sent to kill people in the Middle East, because what else are spies going to do? In the gameplay we’ve seen, Sam can lure terrorists over by shouting at them – that is, the player shouting at them – and can call in air strikes on enemies under cover.
The voice chat continued in EA’s popular sports games. In Madden NFL, legendary quarterback Joe Montana was able to call specific plays, even targeting specific players on the field, without ever going into a menu. The best new interaction may have come from FIFA, though – not only do you have the ability to make substitutions and change formations on the fly, but you can even argue with the ref. However, using the wrong kind of language can get your team in trouble.
Seriously, can we get that obscenity detector enabled on every Xbox Live game, ever? It’d be nice.
Microsoft also demonstrated how one could use its Bing search engine and Kinect to search for videos to watch by genre. Simply by saying “Bing, Comedy,” the Xbox will return any comedies up for stream, and so on for other genres. Now, it even works in Spanish.
