Your Shape: Fitness Evolved Hands-On

At the Microsoft and Ubisoft press conferences, we had two opportunities to check out Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, the latest fitness game that is tailored specifically for Microsoft's Kinect. As seen during the press conference earlier today, Your Shape now scans your body so that it can track your every move and provide instant feedback. At the Microsoft Kinect event, we jumped into the game and did some yoga, as well as punched bricks to see how well the game registered our movements.

The ability to tell you that your knees aren't bent enough or that your arms aren't straight is important when it comes to doing exercises. Why do it at all if you aren't going to do it right? Our yoga routine started off with some simple Tai chi moves as we kept our stance wide and our arms loose. It's all about breathing and taking it slow, and we instantly felt the worries and stress of E3 fade away, even if it was just for a few seconds. Lines and dots appeared on our scanned body image to indicate whether or not we were in the right position. Some instruction off to the side will let you know what you need to do, and you're given a percentage once you've held that pose long enough. If you aren't very good at following an instructor, written instructions will guide you so that you are aware of what your body is doing.

Once we were all relaxed, we felt the need to check out some gym exercises, which consisted of punching colored blocks that appeared on the screen. The goal was to punch from the opposite side, meaning that if the green block appeared on our right, we needed to punch with our left hand. Once we got the hang of it, it felt like a mini kick-boxing routine as we punched and kicked the blocks into pixels.

There were other fitness routines included, but that's all we got to see. The menu navigation was fairly straightforward. All we had to do was hold an arm out and highlight a dot to confirm our selection. We're curious to see what exercises will be included and eager to find out whether this is really going to replace aerobics classes or end up being another forgotten fitness game.

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved will be available November 4.