Kinect Sesame Street TV
© 2012 Microsoft Studios
We've all grown used to the notion of watching TV. Now it can watch you back, providing you have one of two Kinect titles -- Kinect Sesame Street TV, or Kinect Nat Geo TV ($30 each, from Microsoft Studios). The catch, of course is that you need Microsoft’s $250 Xbox 360 Kinect video game system to make them work. Each title comes in a single jewelcase with two disks containing recent (2011-12 season) television episodes with games that invoke Kinect's motion-sensing camera and microphone. Additional episodes, offered for sale from the main menu, cost $5 each and require both an Xbox Live account and free hard disk space. The Sesame Street package contains two themed disks on growing up and science. Each disk contains four 30-minute episodes of the show. After you move your coffee table to the side and calibrate your Kinect, you’ll see yourself inside an onscreen mirror with Grover or Cookie Monster, who might ask you to jump to shake coconuts from a tree, or wave to pop the bubbles floating on the screen. There’s no shortage of counting, sorting and waving, as you might expect. A second player can jump in simply by entering the camera’s field of view, making this an excellent social experience. If you step out of the room or just get tired, your Xbox waits for about 45 seconds and then starts churning through the episode on autopilot. You might consider this the couch potato mode.
$30, Xbox Kinect
Teaches: early learning, counting, reading, movement, gross motor coordination
CTR Rating: 82%