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Lumiappaday #26: Kinectimals demoed on the Nokia Lumia 800 #XboxLive

| December 12, 2011 | 10 Replies
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Here’s the first of the Xbox Live titles I’m going to be demoing on the Nokia Lumia 800 (haven’t had the time to record them, hopefully next week I can do more XBL titles). As it is, I haven’t completed this one either to know everything it does but I’ll share what I’ve got out of it so far. This is Kinectimals, a title that can integrate with the Kinectimals for Xbox. I will be focusing on the phone app.

#26) Kinectimals

Price: £2.29

Link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/5a3f9c59-1d30-4895-bb76-641bdd959a8c

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOuJI5YzhfA

Developer Blurb:

This irresistible mobile experience gives you the chance to use your phone to visit the island of Lemuria and play with, care for and fall in love with your very own cub. Bring your pet with you wherever you go! If you’ve already experienced Kinectimals on Kinect for Xbox 360, your phone becomes the key to unlocking five new cubs on your console. Stand-alone mobile game features Kinectimals’ signature visual quality, delightful animation and brand new ways to play with your cub!

Rating: 9.5

Design: 10

Kinectimals is gorgeous. The graphics are awesome; you have some stunning visuals in your 3D kinectimal. I think they’re all some sort of (wild)cat. I picked a tiger for mine and called him Lumia. He’s really playful and makes the cutest sounds. It’s awesome the ways you can interact with your kinectimals, petting it, feeding, washing, teaching tricks, playing ball, jump rope etc. It’s like your modern day 3D tamagotchi basically.

I haven’t explored all the maps but you can see a lot of work has gone into designing the different locations. They look great and sound great.

The menu to navigate Kinectimals looks really nice, very polished. There are nice touches such as resuming the game and coming back to your cub at the location you left him/her and watching them bump the screen.

Usability: 9

The app is pretty straight forward – first choose your cub and then name it (you can unlock more cats as you progress through the game).

When you return you can choose to make a new one or go back to your first kinectimal.

You have 4 main buttons on screen, pause, achievements on the the left whilst on the right you have challenge (trophy icon) and inventory (box icon).

He's already trying to play ball

You can immediately start by petting your kinectimal, rubbing it’s back.

It might roll over for you as it wants you to rub its belly. Here he is trying to catch your finger.

 

Pressing the trophy icon shows up a list of challenges. These are tricks and activities your kinectimal can learn to perform.

You’ve got the tutorial mode to start to show how to perform those moves and later you can progress to challenge mode where if you complete them sufficiently, you will earn coins as well as achievement awards and gamer points for Xbox Live.

Now with those points you can buy stuff from shop by first clicking on inventory. No actual cash to exchange, just ones you earn whilst playing the game.

You can purchase food, drink, balls, pendants and collars (not sure if there will be more as the game progresses). Each category also has it’s own different types of items, e.g. from kibble to steak in the food section.

Something cool that I missed out during recording is camera mode, where you can put your kinectimal in a photography studio and pose it and take pictures.

You can change his pose, size and rotate him about. It's all gestures so pinch zoom, two fingers to pan etc. Very responsive

You can even put your own picture so you can be sitting there with your kinectimal. Nice touch.

You can then save this to gallery

 

Other things you can do include the tricks mode where you can practice all your learned tricks.

There’s a map to travel to different locations (with different backgrounds/activities/sound).

Swiping over again from inventory looks at items you’ve purchased, so from here you can select the food to bring to your kinectimal.

If he’s hungry and you haven’t fed your kinectimal, they’ll come and bring a bowl to you. You can give food (and drink) if you have it but if you don’t, the game will suggest you purchase some. Also if you’re not doing anything he will run to the side to fetch a skipping rope or a ball for you to play with.

Another thing you’ll notice is your kinectimal getting dirty, and with that you can give it a sponge bath to clean it up.

 

Performance: 9

Skipping rope. He tripped over because I missed. 🙁

The graphics look great and they are fast and fluid, very important when having a 3D game that you aren’t let down by having poor frame rates.

Within the app itself navigation is really quick and responsive, the game controls are pretty responsive.

There are little niggles such as maybe, when you stroke the kinectimal, it continues processing previous strokes even when your finger isn’t there any more.

The major annoyance is that 1) it does take a while to load and 2) no multitasking means you will have to wait and load all over again and select the cub. A quicker resume would have been welcome, which is odd since when you go to camera mode, you can resume quickly back to the game.

There is an Xbox feature with this but I haven’t tested it.

But if you stay in the app, don’t exit, it is fine. It is quick, fluid, responsive and stable.

Price: 10

This is a stunning game, very well put together and whilst one of the more expensive apps we’ve checked so far (well most are either free or 79p) I think it is so worth it for £2.29. That’s one of the lowest prices for a Xbox Live title (and you will see some very expensive ones later).

Conclusion:

Stunning application that is packed with surprisingly a lot of things to do. It will be great for young kids but also a crowd pleaser across all ages actually. It’s simple enough for everyone to use but there is something about a cute animal that turns even adults into kids again.

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Tags:

Category: Applications, Games, Lumiappaday, Windows Phone, XboxLive

About the Author ()

Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and  Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.com