Kinectimals for Windows Phone
This month, Kinectimals for Windows Phone 7 was released — with more great reasons to visit the island of Lemuria. Depending on how you count it, this is the third offering in the Kinectimals line, including:
In my opinion, the original Kinectimals was the best launch title from the original Kinect wave – and it recently received new life with the Bears add-on pack.В Kinectimals is a richly immersive experience where your Kinect actions were full motion and logical for the game, from running in place through challenge courses to broad gestures for training the cub to do new tricks. Before getting into the K/WP7 game itself, let’s quickly celebrate another great integration between the Xbox360 & Windows Phone. With Xbox Live as the glue, along with achievements and the ability to transfer your cubs from your phone to your console and vice versa, this is why every gamer should carry a Windows Phone. |
If you haven’t already bought Kinectimals – it now comes with Bears. (Amazon
)
If you already have Kinectimals – the Bears are an add-on. (Xbox Live)
Either way, now there is Kinectimals for Windows Phone.В (Marketplace)
With all of that being said, let’s talk about the K/WP7 game itself.
In reality, K/WP7 is a revisit of the original game K/360, starting out with a cub and an empty map. Like in the original game, you can: 
- Care for your cub with various foods and drinks
- Train your cub to sit, spin, jump and 20 something other tricks
- Play catch with balls
- Jump rope (instead of the kicking games)
- Adorn with collars and pendants
- Etc.
See original Kinectimals blog post for more detail on these.
For everything you do, you get training points which unlock additional cubs as well as new tricks, challenges, food items, and most importantly — unlock additional pieces of the map to continue your journey. In K/WP7, you’ll visit most of the same venues of the original K/360 game, including beaches, temple ruins, blossom orchards, etc.
In lieu of the full-body controls of using Kinect, K/WP7 does a great job of using finger gestures to control your cub — with precise flicks of your finger to toss balls (with varying speed for varying distance thrown) and motions to induce the myriad of trained tricks that your cub will learn. The mini-games (challenges) test your memory and precision, though some of them can be a little finicky with the gestures.В And of course, it comes with Xbox Live achievements and gamerscore.
In my family, my seven-year-old daughter finds K/WP7 easier and more fun than full-fledged handheld pet games (e.g. Nintendogs), my wife is obsessively fixated on winning Gold in all of the challenges and I am happy to have another immersive WP7 game that yields some pleasant downtime and some achievement points. Being able to earn new animals and send them to my 360 game is yet another perk … which, to paraphrase PokГ©mon, “ya gotta get ‘em all”.
Hats off to the folks at Microsoft Game Studios for extending one of the best Kinect launch titles yet again — this time to Windows Phone.
November 12, 2011
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Jason В· 
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Tags: Ages 10-12, Ages 6-9, Kinect, Kinectimals, Windows Phone В· Posted in: Game Reviews, Games for Kids
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