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Capcom believes Steel Battalion is the most accurate Kinect game yet

Thanks to updates to Kinect's gesture-recognition capacities, Capcom is pretty sure mech sim Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is the best game the motion controller has fielded.

Producer Kenji Kataoka told Eurogamer that close collaboration between Capcom and Microsoft has helped From Software drag extra accuracy out of the tech.

"Initially, when we started testing Steel Battalion on Kinect, the movement recognition was done by area. It detected where your hands are, and that's how the program tried to see what you were trying to do," the producer explained.

This silhouette-style recognition wasn't good enough for the complex mechanical gestures Steel Battalion requires, as it needs to track precise movements of the head, arms and shoulders to accurately simulate a battlefield situation.

"So Microsoft developed another whole set of technology that meant it recognised actual gestures, not the absolute area. Now it's a combination of coordinates, area and gestures. That adds a lot more accuracy," Kataoka added.

"It now can detect what your intentions are just by small movement rather than the absolute coordinate of where your hands are. In the end it turned out really well, but we really had to grill it to the last with Microsoft to make this happen."

Kataoka maintains that this fine tuning makes Steel Battalion the best Kinect game to date.

"Against the ones that are already out, I do think we've gone the deepest and we've checked every single alley and potential Kinect can offer," he said.

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is the follow up to an Xbox game famous for its expensive and enormous controller. The sequel uses a control pad in conjunction with Kinect, which seems something of an improvement. It releases in June.

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Brenna Hillier avatar

Brenna Hillier

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Based in Australia and having come from a lengthy career in the Aussie games media, Brenna worked as VG247's remote Deputy Editor for several years, covering news and events from the other side of the planet to the rest of the team. After leaving VG247, Brenna retired from games media and crossed over to development, working as a writer on several video games.

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