Unfortunately for the Ranters who were hoping to interact with the lifelike A.I., the rumors of Milo being cancelled are true. Kipman insists that his company never envisioned the Lionhead-developed demo as a game. According to him, Milo was nothing more than a sandbox used to create various experiences:

Using those emotional connections as a jumping off point, Kinectimals was born. Gamers will interact with their virtual animals in a manner similar to how they would have interacted with Milo. Mr. Kipman continues, saying that everything that was envisioned for Milo is in Kinectimals.

The thought of never getting to interact with Milo isn’t pleasant, but gamers anxious to experience the character can take solace in the fact that Microsoft feels they’ve realized what they wanted to achieve with Milo in Kinectimals.

“Kinectimals is about creating an emotional, deep relationship between you and this tiger cub. It uses identity, knows who you are. It actually reacts differently when you walk in front of it, because it’s your tiger, than when I walk in front of it, because it doesn’t know me. It uses voice, so that you can interact with it and play with it, it uses gestures and essentially moves you to this deep adventure on an island where you’re finding the secret of a pirate in much the same way as a traditional adventure type game.”

“This is one of what I would say was one of the key innovations, that captured people’s minds with Milo - this idea that we could create an emotion engine, an engine that would fuse these human input behaviours and create a relationship with this imaginary character. What I think you see in Kinectimals is precisely that.”

Are there any Ranters that have played with Kinectimals yet? What do you think of the title? Do you still want to see Milo as a game release, or is Kinectimals providing what you wanted from Milo? Let us know in the comments section, or better yet, join us in our Kinect community discussion!

Kinect and Kinectimals are available now for Xbox 360.

Source: Gamesindustry.biz