Family Christmas Present - Kinect or Wii

Merry spendy bloody Xmas.

I was thinking of finally picking up a wii - at Xmas as a family present. My wife did some sort of kinect skiing with Alex, my older boy, in Tesco and she thinks I should go for that.

I'm doing some research but would appreciate some thoughts. I've been thinking of a wii on and off for ages, and was tempted by kinect before but does it have a future?

What do you reckon? The winner would have better potential for young kids, better educational value, more robust support in the future (or a better back catalogue, which of course is the wii).

It's got to be the wii, hasn't it?

Hmmm Kinect is very fun, but it doesn't have Zelda. But after Zelda is out there is nothing of note for the Wii left.

Buy a Wii so you can keep the 360 all to yourself ;-)

Seriously though how many people are going to be playing at the same time? With Kinect you can only have 2 active players and with the Wii you can have 4, but you will have to shell out for extra Wiimotes.

The Wii has got the bigger back catalogue, but it is filled up with numerous mini-game compilations that are really quite poor. I can't see Microsoft dropping support for Kinect until they release a sequel with the next Xbox!

Personally I would buy a Wii bundled with Wii Sports and Sports Resort, grab an extra Wiimote and have a great time playing it over Christmas. Plus you can also pick up the core Nintendo titles like Zelda and Mario to satisfy the gamer in you :-D

Kinect is gonna come bundled with all new XBOXes and the next gen xbox as well I think, so I'd say it has a future. Not tried it myself mind.

Wii on the other hand, Wii-U (the HD version lol) is due out next year so I'm guessing the old Wii will swiftly become obsolete. And yeah apart from wii sports and the odd zelda game everything else is shit.

Kinect I reckon.

I can't think of more than a couple of games for the kinect that are more than those camera type games that came out on the PS2.

The Wii isn't likely to get any more games that are worth playing but there's enough of a back catalogue of exclusives that are worth getting.

I wouldn't expect much more from either this generation so it's only the back catalogue I would base it off.

In all fairness, easily the worst timing to buy either I would say. Kinect is not really the finished product, but I assume they had to release it because it was taking too long/going over budget. The Wii is also finished, but does at least have a chunky backlog of stuff to get.

Go for the Wii.

So opinions are quite unanimous then ;-)

Future Wii releases aren't that relevant, I guess I wanted to know if there is enough there for da kids, and also whether kinect actually has / will have anything decent (my impression is like Micro_Explosions i.e. that the software is pretty crappy at the moment).

Also, Sil, I know your first line is in jest, but trust me it's a factor!

Will mull some more. Thanks.

Wii.

It has actual games on it.

Also "With Kinect you can only have 2 active players" needs "providing you live in an empty parking garage" added to it.

We have a Wii and Kinect. As family gadgets, Izzy (daughter) and I use both. Wife wouldn't touch the Wii because of the two controllers, but Kinect is the only thing that's ever got her playing games. The caveat, as ilm says, is that you do need a big room. We've only got a little Victorian place so quite a small front room once the sofa is taken into account. We can just about get 1-player and even then because of our extreme height difference (Izzy is 8 years old, I'm 6'3") if you adjust it for one of us you have to adjust it again for the other because the camera is so close. I reckon you need a clear space of 3m x 3m square for the Kinect to work at optimum for 2 players.

The Wii may be a shit console, but it also happens to have some cracking games on it. Whereas the Kinect is just shit. Seriously, does it even have a single game of note? Child of Eden perhaps, but even that is apparently better with a pad.

As a 360 owner I haven't even looked twice at the Kinect, but it seems that's what MS is focusing on nowadays. So it'll definitely win out in terms of future support - but if it's only casual games and mini-game compilations you're after, I don't think support for that will dry up on the Wii anytime soon either.

The Wii is dead, Kinect has a future (whether you like it or not).

A vote for the Wii here. Why? Because Kinect is an incredibly flaky piece of tech that demands a huge amount of time and patience when you're trying to set stuff up for families (or kids) to play something. The Wii doesn't require as much mucking around with, and there are far more family friendly games that are rock solid and entertaining. Compared to Kinect's current catalogue, and some of the utter shovelware arriving for the thing, I'd go Wii. It might be a 'dead' console but you've got 5 years of titles to hoover up for it, any one of which would be more approachable and dare I say more fun than the handful of titles that work well on Kinect

Not to mention the games are now slowly getting cheaper and haven't exactly aged yet.

Not to mention the Gamecube back catalogue.

Not this prototype version of it, though.

Thanks everyone for chipping in. I think we'll have to see what happens with the kinect. I've no problem buying the wii even if it's dead, for the reasons you say.

Be careful. The new Wii thats in the shops now doesn't have Gamecube capatibility if thats important.

That's a dilemma indeed. I'd be tempted to bank the cash for a Wii U and just get Monopoly out or something like that.

If it's skiing games then you can do a lot worse than one of the Shaun White games on the Wii combined with a balance board.