Occasionally I can be found dancing up a storm in the living room, however lately it has been because I have been playing Dance Central on Xbox 360’s Kinect. With over 30 songs, old and new, you can chose to ‘break it down’ with step by step tutorial, ‘perform it’ by yourself or ‘dance battle’ against another person.
We had to rearrange our living room in order to have enough room to dance in front of the sensor; Xbox says you need 6 to 10 feet. Standing in front of the sensor, on screen it shows you where you should stand and usually has no issue finding you. The sensor can lose you if are too close, too far away or if another person steps into the frame and confuses it. Mirroring the dancer on the screen, you have to focus on every aspect of the body, unlike Wii, which could only really sense one arm movement.
The graphics are very impressive of both the main dancer that you follow and the back up dancers. The sensors pick up on all your movements as well, highlighting in red the part of you body that is not doing the right action. While there may not be a story line, the game does progress, once completing the dance with a 4 star rating you are able to unlock new difficulty levels, meaning new dance move for songs.
Wireless and control-less makes Kinect very different and fun to play. While using your hands to scroll and select, it can feel very futurist, but can also be a bit difficult to select. There is the option to use the Xbox controller, but that takes away from the whole feel of the sensor.
Overall the fact that I can dance in front of the Kinect and it can sense all of my movements (and even play back certain parts of my dance from use of the webcam) is very amazing and as I said earlier, futurist! Technology is moving very rapidly and the Kinect for Xbox is just the next step!
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