Microsoft held a Kinect event in San Francisco to show off several games, many of which we've seen before, but we did get the opportunity to chat with Phil Spencer and go over the new user interface with Craig Davison.
There were a small handful of games that I hadn't played before, including Body and Brain Connection from Namco Bandai, Adrenalin Misfits from Konami, and The Biggest Loser Ultimate Workout from THQ. Scroll down for more!
Body and Brain Connection is like Brain Age for the Kinect. It's surprising how much harder it is to coordinate with your limbs when you don't have the precision of a stylus in your hand. There's a collection of 20 minigames that are split into five categories: memory, physical, reflexes, math, and logic. One minigame has you moving your arms as though they were clock hands to display the time that is shown digitally. Another has you popping numbered balloons onscreen from the smallest to the largest number. There is even a game where you have to control Pac-Man with one hand and another character with the other while avoiding ghosts. It's surprisingly difficult to watch both sides of the screen and coordinate with both hands.
Adrenalin Misfits is a crossboarding game from Konami where you pick from a list of wacky characters and bomb down a hill that may or may not be covered in snow. There are a variety of environments to race in and multiple modes. It's like a typical snowboarding game in that you can participate in downhill slalom or do something more focused on tricks. There's a balloon buster mode where you need to find as many balloons as you can as you go down the course. As you would on a real board, you lean forward to increase your speed and lean left and right to turn. How the controls work will depend on your board and the character you pick. Going with the big fat armadillo was probably a bad idea when all I wanted to do was be fast. There are power-ups to collect, though, so you can harass your opponents a bit on the way down.
