Kinect Sports: Season Two Launch

We attended the UK launch party of Kinect Sports: Season Two from Rare earlier on this week. The location for the event was a temporary Kinect Sports Ski Chalet located in the quite frankly awesome Ice Bar London. Once I’d got past the pair of husky dogs guarding the entrance I found the demo stations running the game and a brilliant Rare logo ice sculpture.

Kinect Sports: Season Two is the latest offering from UK developer Rare and features 6 new sports:

• Skiing
• Golf
• Tennis
• American Football
• Baseball
• Darts

Chemmy Alcott who is the current British No. 1 downhill ski racer was the guest of honour for the evening and if you felt brave enough you could try and beat her at skiing. I didn’t. Instead I disappeared off to try out a few runs down Sunny Peaks without Chemmy watching.

Out of the various skiing events, I enjoyed the giant slalom race best as it featured gates dotted at intervals down the mountain which you had to swerve to pass through and some big jumps thrown in to spice things up.

Using the Kinect sensor I crouched to gain speed, jumped to jump and leaned left or right to steer my on-screen skier. I found it pretty easy to control my character which probably explains how I managed to set the best time of the whole evening. This feat netted me a fantastic pair of skiing goggles and some beanie hats courtesy of Salomon.

It’s great to see skiing making an appearance along side your typical sports like golf and baseball. You just can’t beat a bit of leaping around the living room pretending your an ace downhill skier. It’s a lot cheaper than a winter holiday too.

The rest of the event took place in the Ice Bar, which I can’t recommend enough. It is an absolutely beautiful place to have a drink. All of the ice is imported from Sweden with both the bar and your drink glasses made entirely out of the stuff. Everything is kept a a constant -7 degrees Celsius so we had to wear one of the special Ice Bar jackets to keep us warm. The gloves that were attached to the jacket were essential if we wanted to hold our ice glasses for more than a few seconds. It was certainly a fun evening.

Kinect Sports: Season Two is available now for Xbox 360.