:D

I didn't expect to be writing about a post about confessing my love for a dancing game, but here I am.

A couple of years ago a device, eventually dubbed Kinect was unveiled by Microsoft at the electronic entertainment expo. It's an add-on to the Xbox 360 that allows your entire body to be the controller in games. Using a camera, multiple sensors and microphones, it tracks your entire body and communicates it back into the game, allowing you to manipulate the environment.

I was originally skeptical of such a device, it seemed like a gimmick with nothing but seemingly simple kids games, attempting to copy the success of the Nintendo Wii.

One game caught my eye though, it was called Dance Central. It tracked your body through a series of dance moves against a number of well known songs, it looked pretty fun. I've never been into these types of games before though, so I didn't know if I was going to end up buying it.

A year or so passed and the Kinect was released and surprised many, this thing actually worked and they went on to sell a ton of them.

In late december during the holiday break, I decided what the hell, i'm going to take a risk and buy this thing knowing well that it could easily turn into something I don't use.

So I walked into JB Hi-fi, grabbed it, walked up to the desk, thoughts passed through my mind, wondering what the hell the guy at the register would think, slightly concealing it in my arms so people couldn't see the game, waiting for a funny remark. It went better than expected. I felt like an idiot.

The only downside to the Kinect is the space it requires. My apartment is small and the fact that i'm tall doesn't help as you need to fit your entire body in the camera's view.

So I needed to make some changes to my living room, moving my couch as far as it could go, at least 3 metres against my fridge door, I have about 4 metres of space between me and the TV, so it works pretty well.

I turned it on and was surprised, it turns out that it does in fact work well. Moving my hand across the screen I selected Dance Central.

To navigate the menus you move your hand up and down, Minority Report style, then when you have something you want, you move your arm horizontally from right to left, 'locking' it in place, it becomes natural and fast after awhile.

Loading up the first song on easy I attempted to match the moves, this is pretty good I thought to myself. As time went on I started to master particular sequences, slowly getting used to certain songs.

I couldn't help but grin when I started to get a hang of it and felt pretty awesome at the end of the song when I got better and better over time.

Soon I was getting 5 out of 5 stars and advancing through the game, ranking up. It's so much fun imitating the dancer on screen. It's a good workout as well, my body aches after awhile.

I'm only part way into it now and this thing gets hard and fast. Some of the moves are ridiculous, but the goal of perfecting each one is a lot of fun.

On the topic of accuracy, it's amazing that it can track what your doing so well. If you do a move slightly wrong it knows. It's difficult to trick this thing. There are only a few moves that it can't track completely since its viewing you front on. 98% of the time it's perfect.

It will be a cold day in hell if you were to see photos of me actually 'dancing', but to give you some idea here is a video from when it was first demonstrated.

You're not going to be seeing people trying these moves out in public but hopefully you can see the fun side of it, so give it a try if you get the chance.

Was it worth buying it? Yes, i'm not going to stop anytime soon.

End confession.