Today I made an impulse purchase. I bought a Xbox 360 with Kinect package for $300. I was pretty impressed about the Kinect in their promotional videos and was looking for something a little better than my Wii I had before.

First mistake was not looking more closely at the box. I bought a controller for a whopping $45 thinking one wasn’t included.

The first issue I have is not enough space with the current arrangement of my apartment. It says I need 6ft of space, which I have, but apparently that’s like the bare minimum – even with the thing temporarily rigged all the way back on the wall.

Now, not only did I not have enough forward-backward space, but I was dumb enough to not push my coffee table all the way out of the way. So now I have a nice bruise on my thumb from smacking it on the table. Ouch!

Setup and use is pretty easy, though there seems to be a bit of “crapware” included.

The Kinect motions where pretty slick, though a little artificial. I can’t say I’ve seen anything like it before.

The sensor moves up and down to track you better on its own, recognizes your face, picks up your hand position, and enables voice recognition. Pretty smart if you ask me.

The game “Adventures” that came with it was pretty neat. But the rafting game wanted me to jump up on down to clear the raft of the logs. Well, that’s a bad deal because I live in an apartment on the second floor with only wood and drywall between my feet and the downstairs apartment. I’m sure they would love rattling lights.

I look forward to playing with the console more, but I’m done for the night and now watching Aguilera screw up the National Anthem.