Skyrim: Now With Real Shouting

An enterprising Youtuber has jury rigged Skyrim to work with the Kinect and voice commands. The result? Excellence.

Alright, before we start, there may be some references to kicking and leg joints in general in this article, so why don’t you scroll down and get all of those “arrow in the knee” references out of your system before we start. All done? Good.

Youtube user KinectFAAST, known for adding Kinect support to all manner of PC games, has worked his particular brand of magic on Skyrim. As demonstrated in the video to the right, character orientation and movement are controlled by the left arm and right foot respectively. Crouching, jumping and sheathing/unsheathing your weapons are handled via some fairly intuitive gestures, but we all know that’s not why you’re reading this. I’ll put you out of your misery, yes, there are voice commands. Yes, you can activate dragon shouts by screaming them out like a boss.

Honestly, as impressive as the Kinect controls are, I’m more intrigued by the voice commands. Calling out equipment, spell names and dragon shouts is far more elegant and natural than using Skyrim’s rather sluggish favorites system. The setup in the video uses the existing 1-8 hotkeys, each activated by a predetermined phrase. The downside is that the system takes some wrangling to setup, and will require adjustment each time you change your hotkey loadout. The upside is you can, with a little bit of work, fight dragons by screaming expletives at them. Sold.