Today's games use 20-30% of Kinect

Blitz Games claims to be getting nearly twice as much out of Kinect as everyone else. Those games you see on the shelves today - they're using barely a third of what the new device can do.

"A lot of the games you're seeing are using 20 to 30 per cent of what Kinect's capable of," Blitz Games' Steve Stopps remarked to Eurogamer. "What we're doing is using probably 50 to 60 per cent.

"What most developers are starting to do now is they're realising that under the hood of what Kinect can do there's a whole world of potential we're only really just scratching."

The Kinect Sports and the Kinect Adventures and the Dance Centrals of the world are using Kinect in a very "obvious" way, Stopps declared. Yoostar 2, Blitz' game, adopts an "innovative" approach.

Yoostar 2 takes clips from famous films and puts you in them. For instance, Arnold Schwarzenegger telling the Police clerk "I'll be back": you'll watch the scene once and then Arnie will be cut out you will fill his shoes - Kinect removes you from your living room and places you in the scene in real-time.

This process was only possible on PC because Yoostar 1 shipped with a green screen. The PS3 Move version almost had to ship a green-screen, too - until Stopps and team worked out a clever get-around for the PlayStation Eye.

"You'll see a lot of the games coming out in the first generation aren't using much of the voice recognition technology," Stopps continued. "That will add a whole new layer to what people can do within a game and what people can engage with.

"You'll also find that every single game at the moment is a Kinect only game. There's a whole world of opportunities for games to use both controller and Kinect together to deliver a different experience.

"And the third thing," he added, "is the most important: it's the different design approach required to design a Kinect game. It's not necessarily a functionality that exists, it's designing a game with a Kinect mentality - approaching a game from an utterly different direction. You're trying to think of engaging ways to use the body and voice recognition to create immersive and fun gameplay."

When that potential is unlocked, Stopps is "100 per cent yes" convinced that Kinect can support core game experiences.

"Imagine playing something like Halo or like Call of Duty where you're holding a controller in your hand but if you want to look round a corner you actually move your head and the camera position changes," he dreamed. "Those kind of experiences you can create to blend the best of Kinect and the best of a controller."

Yoostar 2 will be released for Kinect and Move in Q1 2011 - "around 21st February," Stopps said. Johnny Minkley talked to Spock about it.

Kinect was released yesterday here in the UK. Eurogamer's comprehensive Kinect coverage - including reviews of the launch games and the hardware - can be found on the homepage.