Chiming in...

Since Pat seems to be the only one to post here, I figured I'd put my two cents in on what I've been playing, which is sadly admitted as not a lot. I picked up Assassin's Creed again before Christmas and vowed to finish it over the two-week shut down my work had, but alas, I don't think it even got touched again after that. Figures. The one thing I have been playing is the Zumba Fitness game for the Xbox 360 Kinect. I'm using it mostly to start up a fitness routine, less for achievements (at least until Jason decides to actually start playing and catch up to me in achievements). Anyway, the routines are not too difficult to do. I started with the tutorials but grew bored with them quickly after trying for about 10 minutes to get one move correctly. The tutorials here remind me a lot of the tutorials for Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance for the PS2, if you don't get the move right successively, you don't get to move on to the next move, which is a huge PITA. Finally, I said screw it and moved on to the Fitness routine calendar for the twenty minute fitness work out. Twenty minutes has never gone by so fast. The dance routine is not incredibly hard to follow but challenging enough for someone who doesn't know what the heck they are doing. Once you get the patterns, it's easier to follow along and get your score up. My criticisms are few, but notable. Sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly what you're doing wrong during a move in order to make it count for scoring. I think it's partly game mechanics and partly me moving in and out of the 6 to 8 ft range. Also could be due to me not doing the tutorials or reading the instructions ("Bah, let's just get into it. I don't got time for no dangnabit instructions.") The other criticism, and this one is probably the biggest, would be the controls on the Zumba menu with the Kinect. Now I don't know if this is all Kinect games or just this one, but the scrolling interface for navigating through the menus is very touchy and difficult to use. It may just take some getting used to, but still, it should not be that difficult to move from "Edit Player" to "Play Game". Really, for as few options as there are, they could have used static icons instead of making you scroll through them. Other than that, I'd say it was a decent workout game, so far (you know, just being on the Beginner Levels), but more to come.

Next up (eventually): A review of EA Sports Active 2...