The game is due this fall from Majesco, perhaps best known for the Zumba Fitness and the Cooking Mama series. It's the first announced title to use the Kinect motion-sensing controller to follow an object beyond the player's own body.Sports games have gotten more realistic: Golf games use the player's real swing and Nintendo's Wii Sports Resort includes basketball shooting among its sports.In most motion games, "you are pretend playing. You are moving your arms and doing different gestures," says Majesco senior product manager Tony Chien. Here, "you are not pretending to dribble a basketball, you actually have to dribble a basketball."Players bounce the ball to the beat of the music; your visual cue is a line of basketballs that flows on a musical trail — think Guitar Hero or Rock Band.Then an icon prepares you for an upcoming basketball move you need to perform, also in time with the music. That may be a crossover from one hand to the other, a dribble between the legs, a pass fake or shot fake.
Players learn to use left and right hands and look up while dribbling, skills used on the real basketball court. With three skill levels — rookie, pro and baller — the game "can keep up with you and will challenge you along the way," says Vicky Picca, the NBA's senior vice president for licensing and business affairs.
"It's a completely novel and new approach to the video game category."
First, players choose their favorite NBA team (all 30 are represented). Team logos and color schemes adorn the game setting. And as you play, you can unlock posters, trading cards and videos of each team's stars performing SportsCenter-worthy moves.
Majesco had been developing a basketball game for several years, "but when we saw Kinect, we thought this was really the way to bring an active basketball experience to market," says chief marketing officer Christina Glorioso. The developers wanted to use a real basketball, so programmers adapted Kinect's ability to read players' bodies so it also would pick up the motion of a basketball.Players get to master their skills to a variety of hip-hop and rock music. Among dozens of songs in the game are tracks from Kanye West, Gorillaz, Run-DMC, Skrillex, Common, Tiësto and Them Crooked Vultures.NBA Baller Beats is the latest advance for Kinect, which has sold 18 million units worldwide since November 2010.
"We have seen the platform used in some unique top-selling games," says Xbox marketing general manager Matt Barlow, "as well as ways few imagined, bringing the magic of Kinect to uses including the classroom, operating room and boardroom."
