After taking the market by storm, motion-based controls have certainly ended up gathering dust in a corner, abandoned even by their own developers. However, they still have some use... if you're willing to apply some hacks and leave your lungs behind during a game. That seems to be the case with Super Louis 64, who from his small YouTube channel has just adapted an old Xbox 360 Kinect to play Super Mario 64... with jumps and spins included.
In the last few hours, Microsoft confirmed that its Kinect device and those games that depend on it will not be compatible with the new Xbox Series X console. The news doesn't surprise us since the Kinect stopped being manufactured in 2017, and if we throw a pinch of sincerity on the situation, the truth is that the Kinect was always more popular in labs and hacking spaces... a detail that brings us here today. No matter how much Redmond thumbs down its own hardware, with a little creativity it's possible to break the Kinect's chains and use it for other things... for example, to control Mario.
Or at least, controlling Mario in aspects like jumping, crouching, and punching. The problem is that Super Mario 64 has no mercy in some of its passages (combining those commands correctly is vital to advance), and the YouTuber Super Louis 64, known for his strange control mods (for example, finishing Dark Souls with a banana), lived his difficulty first-hand.
https://old.neoteo.com/como-construir-tu-propia-nintendo-64-portatil/In other words, almost everything in Super Mario 64 depends on the jump, and within minutes, Louis was exhausted. Even in the water level he was forced to jump to swim. As if that weren't enough, he also programmed a "secret movement": spinning on his own axis. Louis configured the Kinect to recognize the turn, and imitate the rotation movement on the Nintendo 64 gamepad. That way he was able to defeat Bowser, although he almost ended up fainting in the middle of the stream. The experiment demonstrates the difficulty of "translating" physical movements... but at the same time it looks great, and something tells me it won't be the last of Louis with the Kinect.
