XboxFitness.org

The Best Exercise Games for the Xbox Kinect

As most of you can tell, this blog has fallen into a bit of disrepair. The main reason is that the same is true of the state of fitness on the Xbox One. Yes, the “Xbox Fitness” feature for the Xbox One is still available, but aside from that it feels like developers are staying away from the Kinect. The bad press that the Kinect got when Microsoft tried to “force” it on all Xbox One users was bad enough, but something tells me that another reason is that it’s just really, really hard to develop great games for the Kinect that’ll sell in mass quantities.

Since my original post in 2011 about a game called King Fu Live for the Playstation 3, I’ve been a huge, huge fan of a company called Virtual Air Guitar. It was the first game that literally “put you in the game”. It pushed the archaic technology of the Playstation 3 camera to its absolute limits, taking your actual video image and planting it within a Mortal Kombat-like fighting game.

The gaming media at the time poo-pooed their efforts. I just shook my head at how short-sighted these critics were. They focused on things like choppy graphics and motion detection, totally missing the point that this company had successfully pushed the old PS3 way past its limits and showed us a glimpse of the future of virtual reality gaming. I named the game to my list of top fitness games for the PS3, and then when the version came out for the Xbox 360, I named it as one of the best games for the Xbox 360 as well.

And so you can imagine my excitement when I heard the news that Virtual Air Guitar has finally created Kung Fu for the Xbox One with Kinect.

We’re in a time when technology has finally caught up with Virtual Air Guitar’s original vision. If their launch trailer is any indication, the Xbox One’s graphics, processing power and precise Kinect motion-sensing technology are at a point where we can finally play this game the way it was always intended to be played.

The game will be launching in June. I for one can’t wait 🙂

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