Yoonsin Oh

Since the Kinect was released yesterday (Nov 4th, 2010), there are more new exergames released along with its launch. I am not limiting myself to reviewing Kinect related video games here, but I may start with one since it is newer and many of exergamers are interested in their potentials to motivate players to become more active.

Kinect is an additional gaming input device for Xbox 360 that includes camera and microphone to capture players body movement and use it to control games. When I read Chris Kohler’s WIRED review on Kinect and related games (read here http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/11/review-kinect/), I did not have high hope for this device. After I used the PS2 EyeToy and PS3 Move Camera, I was somewhat reluctant using another camera device because EyeToy haven’t been working that great with dim light and Move Camera showed low resolution looking dots all over when I play it in somewhat darker place which is my living room. After testing Kinect in my dimly lit living room at night, Kinect worked great.

As Chris Kohler discussed in his WIRED article, Bogost wrote about space requirements for some of these exergame (read here: http://www.bogost.com/blog/diskinect_in_the_living_room.shtml). I live in a very small tiny apartment, and I’ve used my place for my yoga practices, step aerobics, even hula hooping (the real stuff, not exergames). I am a poor international student who own less stuff, for example,couches, might made these activities not so big deal in my place. I was concerned about Kinect’s space requirements, but I was able to play Kinect Adventure, Dance Central, Your Shape Fitness Evolved, and Kinectimal just fine in my small apartment.

As first of this review series, I want to start with Harmonix’s Dance Central. I have to say this to Harmonix – “thank you for how you integrated the selection system in the game”. Since Kinect is pretty new, every game has very different way for players to select menu items. The most common one I saw is holding hands on an icon and wait for few second to know that was player’s selection. In Dance Central, player just slide in the selection. It fits well with the entire game theme of dancer world or even DJ World.

There are mainly three parts in this game: Break It Down, Perform It!, and Dance Battle. First, players can choose to learn the dance move little by little in “Break it down”. The Dancer you are learning from teaching you how to do certain moves. When you are good, you don’t need to practice, but if you aren’t stable on the move, you need to practice and prove at least 3 times correct moves. I was surprised how they are pretty good at figuring out wrong moves. It shows as red lined area of dancer (teacher)’s body parts and also your dancing teacher will give you a feedback to practice more. In Perfom it!, players do the routine as they learned from Break It Down. In Dance Battle, two players can do the battle one followed by another player. Unlike Kinect Adventure, it doesn’t pick up two people’s motion at the same time. Since the entire game play uses the Kinect to detect player motion, it also captures players dancing moves and I don’t really like that feature. I can’t even find a way to remove that picture. I can’t really tell, but it seems to store the last dance performance.

The actual game interface looks a bit busy with dancers behind, and lead dancer (teacher, but also shows players correct or wrong movements – which could be confusing whether I need to associate the main dancer as me or just teacher to follow). It also includes small box of myself on the far right corner and lists of move icon and names in order of routine. Although they may look busy, I appreciated sequence of moves in a small box with icon and name to let players what to expect for next move.

It is still very early stage to say, but Dance Central seems to have a good potential to motivate players to get up and move along with lead dancer in the game. I have been actually getting up and moving around in my small living room because it made me wanting to learn more dancing routines.