Friday night is girl’s night in. Pizzas in, Pinot on tap, Xbox Kinect ready for plug and play.
Hold on, Xbox? As in a games console? Yes.
Ambience is set. Doors are locked, curtains are drawn and the surround sound is up. We are going to dance the night away in my living room to Xbox Kinect’s Dance Central.
Harmonix are the brains behind Dance Central and have created a party atmosphere game which teach you dance routines and include songs ranging from Cascada’s Evacuate The Dance Floor to Kool & The Gang’s Jungle Boogie, so we were not short of choices to make fools of ourselves.
The geniuses at Microsoft have invented the Kinect sensor which means that your whole body is in control. There are no control pads or fiddly buttons to press. Which is great for us (girl) gamers who tend to button bash and can’t remember where A or Z is located on a control pad. The fancy technology in the Kinect means the camera, microphone and the sensors can detect your body movement and voice commands.
You do need an element of bravery to dance and goof around with your mates, once you’re over that it is a tremendous amount of fun. The Break It Down mode is the only way to learn the more difficult routines. The dance coach gees you up when you get a flawless finish or encourages you to do better when you don’t get a move on point. While Dance Central doesn’t contain back flips or headstand moves to make you an advanced street dancer, this game can help you learn dance moves that you can easily take to a club.
You do actually break a sweat in this game, if not from the fits of laughter then from the routines itself. In Workout Mode you can enter your weight and keep track of the amount of calories burned during dance time; a game that looks out for you, thank you Microsoft.
If you are up for more banter and a little competition Battle Mode is the way forward. From easy, medium or hard, with or without the flashcards your dance skills are tested with the accumulation of points for the correct moves danced then pitted against your opponent as you dash in and out of the dance area.
For the more confident dancer, going straight to Perform It Mode will guarantee laughs, especially in the freestyle section where you are at liberty to pop it like it’s hot and then have it all embarrassingly replayed back to you via the in-built camera.
The navigation took a bit of getting used to, but once I got the knack of waving commands in the air I felt like I was emulating Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
The downside, or not, as the case may be, is that as the controller you have to be spatially aware. You could blame it on the Pinot for hitting your play mate in the face or you could make the required 6-8 foot of space available. My front room was a bit of a squeeze, there were five of us and a couple bottles of Rosé so being space aware wasn’t entirely on the agenda.
The Kinect takes gaming to a different level. It makes the games console seem less of an insular activity and more socially interactive. With Dance Central it would be an idea that you like to be active and actually like to dance otherwise you may feel a bit of a third wheel watching your friends have all the fun.
The Kinect’s in-built camera ramped up the hilarity of girls’ night by taking pictures and video footage randomly. These gaming moments can be kept alongside other entertainment content on the massive 250GB hard drive. Sleek and in gloss black finish with touch sensitive buttons, this kit is quite sexy and sitting pretty beneath the LCD screen you would hardly notice it was a games console. If that wasn’t enough, with the Xbox 360 LIVE having wi-fi in-built meant I could tweet and dance at the same time. The girls’ night was in full swing; we weren’t dancing around our handbags but having a party focused on Dance Central. Who said girls aren’t gamers? You don’t
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