Xbox Project Natal Is Officially Kinect

•Kinectimals lets you train and play with 20 different virtual cats, including a lion, cheetah and tiger.

•Joyride, a racing game, lets players use their hands to hold an imaginary steering wheel — pull your hands toward you and push back out for an acceleration boost — and their bodies to execute jumps and tricks.

•Kinect Sports has six activities including boxing, bowling, beach volleyball, track and field, soccer and table tennis. To serve a volleyball, you mimic the real motion; in soccer, you can kick the ball or do a header.

•Kinect Adventures includes a river-raft time trial and obstacle course, playable by up to four players. On the raft, playing as a duo, you and a partner must lean one way or another to steer. Jumping helps the raft reach special areas for extra points.

•Dance Central, in development MTV Games, brings a So You Think You Can Dance experience home.

•Star Wars characters and iconic Disney favorites will be featured in separate new games being developed at Microsoft in conjunction with LucasArts and Disney.

• Almost everything was one person at a time, particularly in the Kinect Sports games. Even a game like beach volleyball or soccer was boiled down to individual “moments” of interaction that get strung together into some sort of competition. Even the running in place games were one at a time, though the river rafting and mining cart games (both with a similar mechanic of jumping and ducking through an obstacle course while picking up tokens) could be played with two people at a time. You can at least play games like volleyball simultaneously with someone else over Xbox Live.
• An interesting mechanic we saw was a second player “jumping in” to a game. In the mining cart scenario, when the second player jumped in it immediately went split screen, while in soccer different players took turns by just jumping into position. Sure, some of this stuff was edited for our benefit, but it seems Microsoft is working to make the introduction of a second player or the switching between players something less button-heavy.
• The Star Wars game was pretty badass-looking — you play a Jedi, rushing down stormtroopers and deflecting laser bolts left and right, wielding a few Force powers, and confronting a certain deep-voiced Sith Lord for a one-on-one duel. Based on the gestures and action we saw, though, it was a pretty heavily scripted experience. Still, there’s no scripting a two-handed light saber grip, and that particular action looked like everything we’ve ever wanted in a Star Wars game.
• The yoga game is actually a pretty smart use of the infrared and joint detection software we espied previously. Positions were “checked” by points on the joint — making it certainly harder to fake the moves on Wii Fit — and it seemed to have a tai chi element to it. Your avatar glowed a more intense red based on your three-dimensional approximation — bright red for hands stretched forward, for example.
• No one can tell us the developer, but based on the lighting effects, art style, and similarities to the previously-shown Milo, we’d wager a guess that it was Lionhead Studios. You can pet, snuggle, and teach the little guy to jump and play dead. Adorable? Dangerously so.
• The Kinect menu interface is about as simple as could be. You wave your hand to control a glowing cursor of sorts, and you push forward to “click” on the element you want. Of course, there’s also a very simplified version of the Dashboard to go along with this control mechanism, so it’s unclear if you’ll be able to do everything via subtle hand waves, but the Twitter, Facebook, Zune and Netflix icons were clearly present