My friend wants to get a console for the church youth group. I’m thinking an Xbox 360 with a Kinect would be fine, plenty of goofy Kinect games around for dancing and kids making fools of themselves, and a big catalog of whatever other kinds of games he decides are appropriate (Saints Row IV, no doubt). I know none of the Kinect games are quite Wii Sports caliber, but there also aren’t remotes to lose or throw or replace batteries for.
It’s been ages since I bought my consoles though, and I’ve lost track of the specific SKUs and related concerns. For a situation like this, do you think the base model 4GB + Kinect is fine? Are there hidden drawbacks to the 4GB model?
Or feel free to make a case that a PS3 or Wii or Wii U is really what he wants, or share any anecdotes if you’ve dealt with a similar situation with a game system for a classroom or youth group or camp or whatever. Thanks.
For what it’s worth, the most popular things at the middle school youth group I volunteer with are Rock Band and Super Smash Brothers Brawl. The Kinect and Xbox 360 would probably work pretty well—the biggest thing to consider, I would say, is availability of games playable by 4 people (or more) in short chunks, to encourage switching up who’s playing.
Almost as soon as I posted this, I started thinking maybe a Wii U would be the better bet as far as game selection, kinda for the reasons you’re saying, plus Nintendo is better at combining “family friendly” with high quality. Until I talk more with my friend, I don’t have a good idea of just how conservative his game selection will need to be. Thanks for the response.
The problem I would have with WiiU is it seems somewhat risky in terms of future game selection. Yes, there’s a better likelihood that the games released for it will be more family-friendly, but the overall catalog size is probably not going to get that big. If you go with XBox 360/PS3, it’s easy enough to restrict the games you buy for it to appropriate titles, but you won’t ever get the Nintendo properties.
I believe our church has gone with 360s in the past, but most of our youth are somewhat older teenagers, and most of them have 360s at home so it’s what they’re familiar with.
One other thing to think about, youth groups tend to be pretty rough with their consoles in my experience, especially the controllers. Think about replacement costs for those as well.
