If you have a Kinect, chances are that it isn’t the most used accessory of your XBox 360. Though tons have been sold, there hasn’t been great support of good games for it. In fact, many have been downright disappointing like Star Wars Kinect. The shining light for Kinect has been the Dance Central series.

With the first two titles, Dance Central has proven to be one of the best applications of the Kinect technology in terms of accurate recording of the player’s movements and giving a fun experience that actually utilizes the Kinect technology in a fun way. Now, for the third year in a row, the team at Harmonix brings back its dance craze inspired game with incredible results in the form of Dance Central 3.

The Long

If you’ve never played a Dance Central title before, the premise of the game is very simple. Players stand in front of the Kinect controller and mirror the movements they see of the characters on screen. The angle of their arms, legs and body are all monitored by the Kinect as a player follows the motions on screen. The accuracy of the player’s movements determines how well they score on each dance move. Higher scores mean more stars, which have been trend in Harmonix’s music games for some time now.

For all our Connecticut readers, head down to the Black Bear Saloon in South Norwalk on Friday night, October 19th. Black Bear will be hosting a “Battle for a Cure” event to help raise awareness from 6 to 9 PM to help in the fight against breast cancer. To help support the event, The Flickcast has teamed up with Harmonix to get some big raffle giveaways for the event.

There are going to be four Dance Central prize packs raffled off at Black Bear’s “Battle for a Cure”. The first three packs will contain a Dance Central backpack, a stack of bandanas, disco ball keychains, Dance Central 3 snap bracelet watches, a hat, stickers, a t-shirt and hoodie sweater.

But that’s not all. The fourth Dance Central 3 ultimate prize pack will include everything listed above PLUS a copy of the newly released Dance Central 3 and a sleeveless Dance Central dancer hoodie.

If you are free Friday night, head down to the Black Bear Saloon to help support the Battle for a Cure alongside The Flickcast and the awesome team at Harmonix. There is a $10 suggested donation at the door which gets you free hor devours, a drink special and access to the raffle, silent auction and more. There will also be a special Pink cocktail that night that for every drink purchased, a portion of the proceeds will be included amongst the donations to help benefit breast cancer research.

The music game genre has been around now for a long time and has gone through many iterations. There have been controller based games, dance pad games, and even plastic instrument games. Now, Harmonix, the team responsible for the plastic instrument subsection of the genre goes back to its roots with Rock Band Blitz. Rock Band Blitz is a controller based rhythm game that isn’t just a rehash of Harmonix’s classic Frequency though. It is a compilation of all that the company has learned from and grown with since they embarked in to the world of gaming and music in 1995.

The Long . . .

The first thing you are going to notice is that Rock Band Blitz isn’t your standard rhythm game where the goal is to hit 100% of the notes on screen. In fact, it is impossible to do so. The reason is because Rock Band Blitz is designed to let players choose their path for which notes they want to play. Instead of a note highway assigned to each different player’s instrument, Rock Band Blitz is a one player game with four or five lanes all running next to each other. The player must make choices on which path to take to hit the most possible notes to get the highest score.

The note highway consists of four or five lanes, depending on the song. Each lane only has two notes that can flow down it at once though, a right or left note. It seems simple enough… until you see the four other lanes of notes passing by. This is where the strategy kicks in quick and gives Rock Band Blitz its legs.

As we told you earlier, Microsoft kicked off their E3 festivities with what could be considered a fairly standard and unsurprising Press Conference. As expected, they announced the anticipated console exclusive, Halo 4. Upping the ante from last year, this E3 brought gameplay footage of Halo 4 to the audience with a first look at the new enemies and weapons as well as some familiar faces from past Halos. Microsoft would follow with footage of the new Splinter Cell: Black List which uses enhanced Kinect controls.

Following on the Kinect bandwagon, EA debuted footage of the latest Fifa and Madden franchises. In Fifa, players will be able to make coaching decisions and their reactions will be read by the Kinect and penalties may even be awarded based on poor sportsmanship. In Madden, NFL Hall of Fame Quarterback Joe Montana demonstrated the game’s new Kinect enabled play calling features.

After the Fable: The Journey trailer, Microsoft Studios brought out studio head Phil Spencer who introduced the trailer for the new Gears of War: Judgment, staring Baird, and then the latest racing experience with Forza Horizon.

A year ago, Activision proved you could have too much of a good thing with their Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock release which has been the last major band based rhythm game to come out with any sort of real backing to the mass market. For years, guitar and band games dominated sales charts between Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

Those who presumably had taken this the worst had to be Harmonix who had pioneered the plastic instrument market with the original Guitar Hero only to see their own new franchise Rock Band take a beating from the oversaturated market caused by Activision. But from the ashes of so many plastic guitars and drum kits, a new genre came back to life with the dance game with both Dance Central and Just Dance.

Dance Central would captivate the world by measuring the full use of the dancer’s body to see how accurately they could replicate the motions on screen which quickly made it the defining piece of hardware for the newly launched XBox 360 Kinect peripheral. Now, Dance Central 2 returns to show you really can’t have too much of a good thing… as long as you do it right.

Gameplay:

Dance Central 2, like its predecessor, revolves around players standing in front of their TV and mirroring the dance moves in front of them. At heart, it is an incredibly simple concept but anyone who has tried dancing at any point in their life can vouch that just because you can see it done in front of you, it doesn’t mean you can do it too without a little practice.

Dance Central 2 works with all levels of dance skill thankfully so people who are experienced dancers can be challenged while rookie rump shakers can still enjoy themselves even though their arms and legs flailing in the air may make them look like they are having a seizure to passersby. Thankfully, individual dances still have the freestyle sections where the Kinect takes pictures of players to remind them just how silly they look in motion.

Last year, we took a more traditional approach with our Best Video Games of 2009 article with categories such as Best Music Game or Best Action Platformer. This year we are going to depart from the traditional and give what we think are categories that truly deserve to be rewarded their due.

Best Use of Zombies / Best Downloadable Content – Red Dead Redemption “Undead Nightmare”

The ultimate “What If” scenario brought forth to one of the best games of 2010, “What if the undead invaded the old west?” And the answer doesn’t just involve a lot of people dying. There are horses of the apocalypse, big foot, some hard choices to be made and people turning on or abandoning their fellow man left and right.

This awesome story told over the revamped look of Red Dead Redemption using characters players have already grown to know, love or despise makes Undead Nightmare not only the best zombie game of 2010 but also the best exmple of DLC for the entire year as well.

A few weeks ago, we reviewed Rock Band 3, letting you all know it still holds the title for the best party band game by far.  One of our reasons for this is because of the ever expanding library of music constantly being added to it. Now, we mentioned we are going to be having a live event in Connecticut with some Rock Band 3 prizes coming up in December but until then we have some awesome DLC codes to give away for any Rock Band 3 owners over our twitter.

With the help of Harmonix’s own @HMXhenry we have acquired four codes to giveaway Bon Jovi’s Greatest Hits packs for the XBox 360. The packs include three revamped Rock Band 3 pro guitar versions of “Livin’ on a Prayer”, “You Give Love a Bad Name” and “Wanted Dead or Alive” in addition to nine new songs never before seen in the Rock Band series.

Check out the full list, and get the giveaway times after the jump.

We are not exactly what you’d call a group of talented dancers. For the most part, many of us wouldn’t even be good enough to be considered bad dancers. But that didn’t stop us from picking up the most anticipated Kinect launch title, Dance Central, not surprisingly a game that involves dancing.

At Comic Con, we got our first chance to experience Dance Central and even though it was fairly embarrassing showing our moves to a room full of fellow press, we quickly realized we weren’t the only ones who couldn’t dance (with the once exception being one guy who looked like he was a professionally trained hip hop dancer who was rocking out to “Poison” by Bell Biv DeVoe).  And most importantly, it was fun.

But the question remained if it would be able to sustain itself as a full game and not just a quick burst of enjoyment for a song or two. We are happy to report that the answer is an astounding yes.

Gameplay:

Dance Central is the most perfect use so far of a world without a controller. Using the Kinect, Dance Central monitors every movement a player makes as they try to mimic the on screen dances of the expert dancer characters. Unlike other Kinect games like Kinect Adventures or Kinect Sports, the on screen character is not a direct representation of the player. Instead, it acts as a model of what the player should be doing.

There is a small box on the right of the screen showing a silhouette of what the player is actually doing. When a player deviates from the correct moves, the on screen character model will glow red over the body part that isn’t doing what it should be doing. There is also a Freestyle section of each song where players see a glowing outline of themselves dancing on screen with no direction. To add to the self-deprecation of the non-dancing crowd, the Kinect makes sure to take pictures of you during this portion.

One of the most exciting aspects of working in the industry is the chance to try out new games before the general public does. With those new games sometimes comes the new emerging technologies as well. This year at San Diego Comic Con, Kinect (formerly Project Natal) was available for the press to try out in Microsoft’s private press lounge. While there, I got the chance to try out two of the upcoming Kinect titles, Kinect Sports and Dance Central.

At first glance, many people would look at Kinect Sports and say it is a rip off of Wii Sports. To an extent, their claim is warranted. Kinect Sports is a collection of minigames using the Kinect motion controls centered around various sports. One can’t fault Microsoft for creating this title. It is no secret that Wii Sports helped drive sales of the Wii above the 25 million unit mark to non-traditional video game players. Sony is also producing Sports Champions for the PlayStation Move. It’d be leaving money on the table if Microsoft didn’t capitalize on this trend as well.

The first thing you notice about the Kinect is the lack of tangible feedback. During Kinect Sports, my first instinct was to grasp the bowling ball as my avatar’s hand went over it. The game responds by automatically grabbing the ball, regardless of whether you actually close your hand around it. For a moment, it catches you off guard that you aren’t really holding anything.

Apologies to all but the rigors of E3 and some technical glitches means the podcast is coming out today instead of yesterday. Still, better late then never, right? Anyway, on with the show.

This week on The Flickcast Chris and Matt are joined by games editor John Carle to talk all-things Electronic Entertainment Expo. With E3 in full swing the boys have lots to discuss including all the news and announcements from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony as well as  thoughts and observations about upcoming games, the Kinect, Sony’s Move and the Activision preview event/concert complete with indoor fireworks.

Your hosts also made some great picks this week and in keeping with the E3 theme, all of them picked a game or technology they were most interested in or excited about from the show. John picked Marvel vs. Capcom 3 while Matt decided to choose Portal 2 and Chris took the somewhat obvious choice of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

As always, if you have comments, questions, critiques, offers of sponsorship or whatever, feel free to hit us up in the comments, on Twitter, at Facebook and MySpace or via email.

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