Dance Central - Looks really fun actually

Okay, this is a bit out of my usual territory, but it looks really fun. Dance Central is a game that uses Microsoft’s Kinect to read your movements as you dance along to a song. The game’s dancing character does each move for you to copy, telling you where you went wrong if you did. So, in the process of playing this game, you are learning real dance moves as they go in time with a given song. There’s also a tutorial mode that breaks down each step piece by piece, allowing you to slowly become used to moving your body in the appropriate manner. Developed by Harmonix, of Rock Band fame, there’s bound to be a huge library of songs, which is already confirmed to include Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face,” among several other titles.

The impressions coming out of E3 towards this game have been fairly positive, concluding that although it can make you look like an idiot as you learn, it is very successful at reading your movements. Like other Harmonix rhythm games, it provides difficulty levels over which you can continually improve your abilities.

After looking into this game, which only slightly piqued my interest at the press conference, I’m a lot more excited about Kinect - which will launch on November 4 with Dance Central and 14 other games. It’s like, dancing is something I know I’m terrible at, but it would be cool to learn at some point. And now, this! Although, I feel like I would need to play this in a locked room until I got any good at it.

The video above shows the tutorial mode and demonstrates how exactly it works. The guy in the video isn’t exactly great, but he certainly is dancing, unlike what I do when I try such things.