Pinball FX Gesture Controls: Don't Bother

Filed in archive XBLA on April 25, 2007

One of today's Live Arcade releases is Pinball FX -- a pretty looking pinball game that has the kind of controls you'd expect a pinball game to have: the left and right triggers control the flippers, and pressing the left analog stick in any direction shoves the table. Simple, right? Maybe too simple? Well, developer Zen Studios thought so too -- so they included a gesture-based control scheme using the Live Vision Camera.

How does it work? That's a good question -- I couldn't find any documentation. As far as I can tell, the gesture controls work like this: move your hands around, and hope that you're waving them in the right direction at the right time to trigger the paddles and hit the ball. It's clumsy, clunky, and really, useless.

I don't blame them for trying something new, but when the implementation is this poor, why did they bother leaving it in the final game? The bottom line: stick with the regular controller.