I decided for once to go against my better judgment and be an early adopter. Yeah I know, there’s a lot of risk in doing so, and this time around I feel there may be more than many of us realize. After recording the podcast last night I hopped in my car and drove down to my nearest big box store (the one that rhymes with “Fall Fart”) to try and “become the controller.” Of course, I’m talking about Kinect. I wasn’t sure what kind of crowd to expect so I arrived an hour and fifteen minutes before the 12:01am release. Upon arrival, I was shocked to discover that an area had been cleared and Kinect was set up with Dance Central running. I scanned the electronics area and seeing neither line nor crowd, knew I was guaranteed to score one of the new pieces of hardware.

When I asked the clerk behind the register how many they had, he gave me a puzzled look before saying, “oh yeah. That comes out tonight right? I don’t know if we received any.” After about 30 minutes of phone calls and disappearances into the backroom, he emerged with only 2 sensors and 4 console bundles. So at 11:15pm I knew I was getting one, but I had to wait. I figured the best way to kill time would be to play some Dance Central.

From what I’d played of Kinect at E3 and read since, it seems that Dance Central is the premiere launch title for the system. Developed by Harmonix, it essentially brings the Rock Band concept to the dance genre. The game has you mirror the dance moves of an onscreen character and helps you do this by showing you what the next move is through images on the right side of the screen. If you know what the moves in the picture are it is very easy to fluidly combine the dance moves. I started with the first song on the list – Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, on medium, and 4 starred it on my first try. One really neat thing that the game does is give you a “Freestyle” section in which they have you bust your own moves while taking pictures of you. It then pieces all of these pictures together and plays them back. These mini dance movies are saved and I’m sure there will be some classic party night shenanigans to come.

Overall, I found the game to be a lot of fun, but I wonder how well it will work out at a big party. I tried a song towards the bottom of the list, Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison, where the dance movers were more involved, and since I was not familiar with them I didn’t know what to do when they popped up. Of course my “Freestyle” movie was hilarious but my overall score was terrible. To help fix this the game gives you the option to learn all dance moves for each song before jumping right in. In solo play this would definitely be useful, but again, in the party setting I don’t see it being utilized. I believe Dance Central has the potential to be a great game if you put in the time, but I fear if dumped into a party setting that it may only last for short bursts.

As midnight rolled around I purchased my sensor and raced home to get it set up. The setup and calibration were easy and painless. Since I have an Xbox 360 Slim I just needed to plug the firewire connection into the Xbox. This delivers both power and the data. The system has you move around the room to calibrate the cameras, and then plays audio clues so that it can understand the acoustics of your room. It also does some facial scans to create a Kinect ID that becomes linked to your Avatar. Once this is set up a simple wave of your hand signs you in with your Avatar. This works out great during games, because if you want a friend to play, too, they can simply wave their hand and jump right in. The motion and speech controls work great in the menus. It takes some getting used to but overall it’s a very cool and slick experience.