Yoostar 2 Kinect Preview

Yoostar 2 has been in development for more than two and a half years and aims to leverage Kinect's camera and voice recognition technology in a different way than other games we saw at E3. While my hands-on (or is it hands-off?) demo was relatively short and with a build of the game that's still in a pre-alpha state, the potential of the game to provide fun for your friends and family was readily apparent. 

For those that don't know, Yoostar 2 is movie karaoke in that players will stand in during scenes from their favorite movies. The developers went to great lengths to get approvals from many of the biggest movie studios and actors that you know and love. I was told by my E3 demoer that it takes approvals from every actor in every scene that they want to use, so you can imagine how lengthy the process was to get the 60 scenes that come with the retail game. As if that wasn't enough, there will be a Yoostar store at launch that will house more than 400 scenes in total. 



The list of movies includes Animal House, Terminator, The Matrix, Team America, Godfather, Psycho, Jaws, Beverly Hills Cop and many more. The mechanics are fairly simple: you step up to your system and select "Perform A Scene" with your hand. From there you cycle through a bunch of scenes from the aforementioned movies. I did Terminator's famous "I'll Be Back" scene and things worked pretty well. I was able to step up and align my body properly so I'd be framed properly in the scene. From there I had to read Arnold's dialogue (or I could've selected to be the cop instead) in the scene and shortly thereafter the game spit out a fairly well put together clip. The video and audio quality for my part of the scene still had a ways to go, but there's still plenty of time for the Yoostar developers to tune things now that they're starting to get final Kinect kits sent their way. 

There are also photos of movie sets that players can hop into and interact with however they like. Picture one of the green screened skits from Conan O'Brien's old late night show and you'll get the idea. Outside of performing single scenes, Superstar Mode is a career mode where players will need to complete specific challenges to progress. At the end of every scene the game spits out a score and gives you some critiques about your performance. The game will never be mean or condescending to you, instead it'll just politely point out ways to improve your acting skills (or lack thereof). 

Probably the coolest aspect of my Yoostar 2 presentation was the social networking abilities of the game. Not only will you be able to upload video clips for other users to rate to Yoostar.com, but you'll also be able to do so on Facebook and Twitter. Here's hoping that the integration is smooth and painless and is as simple as Yoostar 2 itself. 

Yoostar 2 is scheduled to ship right around the time of Kinect's launch on November 4, but there's no firm date just yet. Rest assured, we'll bring you more information in the coming months as it becomes available.