Avatar Sports was a sports game in development at Rare Ltd. in 2007 / 2008 before Kinect development started. It used an unpublished motion controller that can be compared to the Wii Remote. Little is known about this title apart from the use of Microsoft’s Avatars and the inclusion of tennis. Development was halted when the motion controller was abandoned and first Kinect/Natal prototypes emerged. Rare then started to create their Kinect Sports, released in november 2010.
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In 2009, British software studio Rare Ltd. started to work on fitness software for Microsoft’s Kinect accessory in co-operation with Nike. The title was allegedly cancelled in mid-2010 because of various fitness titles from third party publishers for the very same platform. As with every game from Rare Ltd, the software had different design directions throughout its development, including a style with rather realistic characters and Avatar-styled ‘protagonists’.
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2 Finger Heroes is a canceled beat ’em up made by Arkedo studios that was supposed to be played with the Natal, the Xbox 360 “play without a joypad” add-on. From the concept arts, we can see that the characters were controlled using the fingers o with some basic gestures, like folding your arms.
An interesting project, which like the other Arkedo games also displayed an original graphic style (as seen in the concept arts below) and a twisted story.
Unfortunately in the end the game got shelved because of development issues. As we can read on NeoGAF:
“One of the designs flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France, could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities..”
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