Recently my friend, who for this article we’ll call “Dan”, was over at my apartment for beers and video games. We’d gone through most of the big recent releases — I showed him some craziness from Saints Row: The Third, got across the gist of Catherine and played some (shockingly fun) split-screen Modern Warfare 3 spec-ops. The Kinect had gotten a go as well, and we’d laughed our way through several levels of Gunstringer and gotten our arses kicked by the surprisingly difficult Child of Eden.
The Los Angeles Times has taken a look at the October NPD numbers, which show that dancing games like Just Dance 3 and Dance Central 2 have grown in sales 326 per cent over last year. That far outpaces the next nearest fastest-growing genre, fighting games, which grew just 33 per cent over the same period of time.
There may be some debate about what the best Kinect game is. Some may say Fruit Ninja Kinect, others will cast votes for Child of Eden and Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer made a strong debut on the motion-sensing camera a few months ago.
I’ve never totally gotten the appeal of Wii dancing games, though clearly there are a whole ton of Just Dance fans out there who disagree. This new ad for Harmonix’s just-released Dance Central 2 takes a humorous dig at Wii games and their obsolescence in the face of full motion-tracking.
On August 16, Dance Central will add “Sex Machine” by James Brown, “Get Busy” by Sean Paul and “Get It Shawty” by Lloyd to the in-game store. The tracks will also be compatible with the upcoming sequel, Dance Central 2.