Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein and with August almost over that can mean only one thing in videogame language Madden is about to arrive and sure mostly the people are rich than that our football fans NFL fans like myself and what is new in each version of Madden doesn't seem to be that big from year to year this year there are actually two new technological innovations that merit some conversation one is a version of madam for the Vita which I'll get to in a moment and the second is that for the Xbox 360 well in addition to man and having a new physics engine and also having a new connected careers mode there's Kinect capability and what that means is that it's not motion it's voice that it's listening to and Kinect can work with a 6,000 word vocabulary that you use to command players on the field it sounds a little complicated and I'm actually wearing a wrist band that Madden sent me with play calls listed in here for help I thought that was a little silly but actually it is a little bit complicated more so than I thought at e3 just because while you can see some of the things that you can say that pop up is words in the huddle a lot of other things that you can use to control the players don't show up so it's kind of like carte blanche and you've got to figure out some of those plays pro players might find some really nice shortcuts in there but a lot of other people might find themselves going back to the buttons just to feel comfortable I'll show you what I mean now we can see that Kinect control works right away and you have to press any additional button to use it it's available anytime that your Kinect is plugged in so let's give it a try quelle heure streak there you go and I got them to control it actually worked it kind of feels sometimes like you're telling a dog to do something and then the dog doesn't quite listen so can be a little frustrating when you're playing game and that's the problem those few seconds of disconnect using the Kinect might really turn off a pro player in a game I did have one incidence where I was controlling a player named shillin's and what I call that chillings it called a challenge and burned a time out now some of that may be get fixed in certain software updates or not but it's something that I've noticed right now but you can do a lot of stuff with Kinect including some things that you couldn't normally with the button controls for instance tell a player to cover a wide receiver in a way that was not so easy to do before the advantage of Kinect is that theoretically you could use us to get some commands you may not know about like oh line block left and I actually worked really well and you may not have realized before that oh I could get my own line to block left there are a lot of deep commands and Madden that this kind of reveals so it might be a fun mode for people to play with just if that play clock were a few seconds longer I've also found using this so far that if you have your volume on your TV high it has a little problem registering your voice I find it works better using headphones right now maybe that would get patched in a software update too because we haven't seen that happen on other kinect controlled games audible audible audible deep pass timeout yeah it's incidentally called the timeout so my advice to you is if you're using the Kinect mode wear a good pair of headphones and then just keep barking in the room until somebody else see you to be quiet so with a little bit of time and maybe a little bit of know how you can finesse out a Kinect game plan that might make sense for you in addition to the buttons but it's gonna be a specialty item and not the killer app that maybe it seemed to be when I saw it at e3 but who knows maybe by mid year I'll find myself barking at the screen more than I thought before now let's take a look at Madden on the Vita which really takes the console and brings it into the portable mode in a way that is better than any previous version of Madden the Vita version obviously takes advantage of the larger screen and better graphics and also pushes out the game to really become a portable version of the console game franchise modes included online mode and pretty much all the stuff the fan and last year's version of Madden and even some of the features in this year's although there won't be a new physics engine and there obviously won't be anything like Kinect capability on the Vita although you kind of could do that so what do you get out of this you get well dual analog sticks to which hey you've never been able to do before on a handheld I mean the graphics are maybe a step down from the console shore and maybe some of the load screens took a bit more than I expected to load up but the experience even down to the submenus is like a carbon copy so you can take it on the road and for if you're a football fan like me that's a tremendous value and could be a real killer app for the Vita which is desperately in need of new and interesting games there aren't that many that can appeal to mainstream audiences I think and something like Madden is one of them this is coming out all at the same time as the console versions on Tuesday and just in time for the football season