14 DAY TRIAL // As promised earlier this year, during his talk at TED Global Conference 2010 in Oxford, Peter Molyneux revealed some details about the Milo and Kate game his company developed for Kinect. Molyneux unveiled new information about the plot, the way the player interacts with Milo and the way Milo's digital mind works.
The game starts just as Milo and his family move into a new home. The players fill in the shoes of Milo's new friend and they are tasked with helping the child find his way in the new environment. The way they interact with Milo will shape the character's development during the course of the game, with Molyneux promising in his usual flamboyant manner that no two Milos will be the same.
Wired.co.uk reports that only the early stages of the eventual game were demonstrated during talk. Players have to join Milo in squashing snails, help him clean his room or teach him how to skim stones. All this is achieved using Kinect, as no other controller is needed. Depending on how well he completes each task, the player will receive a number of points.
More interestingly, there is a special manner in which one can interact with Milo. During the demonstrations, it was shown that Milo can understand commands and can respond appropriately in a conversation. For example, the player was tasked with saying a few words of encouragement and quite surprisingly Milo understood them well and said something relevant in response. Furthermore, it seems that a constant connection to the Internet will be required, as Milo's mind is cloud-based and will not be stored on a disc or hard drive to get smarter as more people use it, coping with more words, phrases or accents. No release date has been announced yet by Molyneux, but he has said in the past that it would surely not come out alongside Kinect in November.