Game Party in Motion is like having a Chuck E. Cheese in your living room. Even though you don’t win tickets, at least you won’t have to eat nasty pizza and listen to creepy singing robots. Play 16 arcade room and backyard game favorites and use your Xbox 360 Kinect to really get into the action.

Game Party uses your Xbox avatars as players and Kinect even takes your picture when you get a high score. You can compete against the CPU or another human player. Anyway, here are the games on this collection:

Hoop Shot

It’s like arcade basketball. Make an upwards throwing motion to sink as many baskets as you can in a given time.

Root Beer Tapper

Remember the old arcade game? This is like that, except you put your whole body into it. Move from side to side and swing your arm to slide root beer to the thirsty patrons. You lose points if you miss someone or if your glass slides all the way off the table and breaks.

Skill Ball

It’s just virtual Skee-Ball (we’re getting close to that one episode in Futurama where they play that). Swing your arm in an underhand motion to roll the balls to the targets. The control is surprisingly accurate here.

Smack-A-Troll

This one is just Whack-A-Mole but you use your feet and hands to swat at troll heads that pop up.

Table Hockey

Just think of Air Hockey on Kinect. The control can be choppy at times, and it’s hard to hit the puck when it’s in the middle. Plus the computer AI is tough. But at times it still plays pretty realistically.

Tic-Tac-Toe Face Off

What do you get when you mix Dance Dance Revolution with Tic-Tac-Toe? You get this. Move your feet to step on the right square first, before the other player does. First one to get four in a row this way wins. The computer players are way too quick, though. This one is best played with two human players.

Double Racquets

It’s kind of like Racquetball or Squash. Hold your hands out like you’re using two tennis racquets and swat balls and try to catch your opponent’s shots on the rebound. It’s pretty tough.

QB in Motion

Now you’re out on a football field, and must make football throwing motions to hit targets. Move side to side to avoid tacklers.

Horseshoes

Just like Skee-Ball, make underhand throwing motions to try and get the horseshoes around the peg. Or close to it, at least.

Bocce Ball

I had never heard of this game before. Apparently, the first player throws a white ball onto the field, and then each player takes turns throwing their colored balls onto the field. And whoever gets theirs closest to the white ball, wins. You can even use your balls to knock the other players’ balls away.

Bag Toss

Just like at the school carnival. Except these bags must be filled lead, because you have to throw underhanded pretty hard for those bean bags to go anywhere!

Darts

Back inside, the dart game is a little weird as you tilt your body around first to aim, then make dart throwing motions to throw the dart. It’s different, I’ll give it that.

Shoveboard

It’s just table shuffleboard. Slide your puck without falling off, but be careful as the other player can knock your puck out.

Pool Hall Party

It’s billiards. Pretty self-explanatory.

Puck Bowling

Just like regular bowling, except instead of a ball, you slide a puck down the lanes, like in Shoveboard or Table Hockey. Not as fun as Wii Sports Bowling, but still pretty neat.

Ping Cup

And last but not least, this is just Beer Pong without the beer. Toss your ping pong balls into the paper cups for points. Just make sure to make gentle motions, as the ball can bounce pretty high and go over the cups!

Kid Factor:

Game Party in Motion is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Comic Mischief. Really the only violent action is getting tackled in the football game. The only bad thing about Game Party is some of the controls in the menu screens and certain games isn’t as responsive, and may frustrate young gamers. They may need a little help starting up. But once the games start, I can see young kids enjoying playing their arcade favorites. Reading skill is helpful for the instructions, but that’s about it.

Tags: Game Reviews