Calorie Challenge Achievements
Had a big lunch? Trousers feeling a bit tight? Chocolate bar gloating at you from behind his cool sunglasses? If you’ve experienced any of these scenarios, the new Kinect Sports Calorie Challenge could be just the ticket.
This brand new game add-on is available here from Xbox LIVE Marketplace for the bargain price of 320 MSP. Not only do you get the chance to punch a pizza in the pepperonis – visual proof here if you don’t believe us – but you’re also awarded with 10 cool new achievements just for burning off calories. Let’s take a look at how to get your taste buds around another calorific 250 Gamerscore.
Break a Sweat: Defeat the Celery in a quick calorie challenge (25G)
Get Energetic: Defeat the Banana in a short calorie challenge (25G)
Feel the Burn: Defeat the Milk in a medium calorie challenge (25G)
Fighting Fit: Defeat the Soda in a long calorie challenge (25G)
Maximum Burn: Defeat the Chocolate in a tough calorie challenge (25G)
Calorie Champion: Defeat the Pizza in a maximum calorie challenge (25G)
5-a-Day: Defeat any 5 calorie rivals within a single day (30G)
Fast Food: Defeat the Pizza and Soda rivals in a single session (15G)
Milk Shake: Defeat the Banana and Milk rivals in a single session (15G)
A Calorie Rival a Day… Beat any calorie rival every day for 5 days in a row (30G)
Check out all the official details here, including the number of calories you need to burn to defeat all those pesky new mascots.
Apr 2011
Superstar Bazaar
Ask anyone’s opinion on the best sporting event in the world, and they’ll almost certainly answer, “Simple! It’s the Kinect Sports Superstars event.” It’s possible that someone might mention the Olympics, but don’t trust them, they’re almost certainly lying.
This was part of a long-running British tradition of making athletes compete in sports they’ve never tried before. Not for holistic training or anything like that – we just like to have a giggle.
Where else could you watch cricketer Graeme Swann pummelling skeleton champion Amy Williams in the Kinect Sports boxing ring? What could be more amazing than seeing Commonwealth table tennis star Darius Knight battling gymnast Louis Smith at the 100m sprint? Tickets would have undoubtedly sold for thousands, but we decided that showing the event on YouTube would be fairer, because London is quite far for some people to travel.
Apr 2011
Top 5 Homemade Viva Piñata Things
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It’s natural for the game teams at Rare or any other developer to become attached to and evangelical about the games they work on. In the case of Viva Piñata, the team went above and beyond in their efforts to show support for their baby, with of course the odd contribution from PR and Marketing. Let’s recall (or in some cases show for the first time) a handful of their creations…
TOP 5 HOMEMADE VIVA PIÑATA THINGS
According to… James Thomas
1. Piñata pumpkins
There’s a steady hand gone into these. The first Halloween after Viva Piñata‘s release saw a multitude of carved tributes, from all corners of the garden.
I feel they were badly pitched, though. This one was carved just after Pester had destroyed my wife’s pride and joy, her Chewnicorn. I don’t think she was too impressed to see the villain of the piece then immortalised in veg.
Images: Pester Pumpkin lit / unlit
Apr 2011
Be A World Record Hero
Have you ever dreamt of becoming a real Guinness World Record holder? This Easter weekend (21-25 April) could be your big chance, as Xbox Nations lets you try Xbox LIVE Gold for free, as well as inviting you to take part in the world’s biggest ever virtual sprint. The record we’re going for is the most people running a virtual 100m dash at one time.
Keep an eye on your Xbox 360 dashboard over the coming weeks. From here, you’ll be able to download a free Xbox Nations gamer pic that will automatically enter you into the record attempt.
Then, all you need to do is play Kinect Sports and complete a sprint mini-game while connected to Xbox LIVE at the time listed below. You must choose sprint from the mini-game menu – not the entire track and field event for your race to count.
The Guinness World Record attempt will take place at:
• 6pm UK Saturday 23/04
• 7pm CET Saturday 23/04
• 10am PDT Saturday 23/04
• 1pm EDT Saturday 23/04
Everyone who downloads the gamer pic and completes the record attempt will be rewarded with this awesome Guinness World Records avatar tee. Then no one will be able to doubt your record-holding credentials! There are also tons of other events happening over the Xbox Nations weekend, so make sure you check out our Kinect Sports Facebook page for updates as they happen.
Apr 2011
Rare Collections
Looking back over the history of Rare memorabilia, the mind boggles that there has never been a Banjo-Kazooie Pez head or a Grabbed by the Ghoulies commemorative plate. However, throughout our 25-year history there’s been tons of other cool stuff, from bendy Battletoads to seemingly hundreds of Burger King Viva Piñata toys. Judging by the amount of these we have lying around the studio, someone here has eaten a lot of Whoppers.
A few weeks ago we put out the call for you to send in pics of your own collections, and we saw some awesome hoards that certainly rival our own. Let’s take a look…
Evan White-Tolbert was kind enough to send us pics of his collection of classic Rare games from around the world. Above, left to right: there’s a super-happy Japanese edition of Banjo-Tooie, plus a huge stash of N64 games including the now rather pricey Conker’s BFD. The pride of his collection is Donkey Kong Land III for the Game Boy Color, which was never released outside Japan (the rest of us only got the black-and-white Game Boy version, bah)!
Stuart O’Brien’s signed copies of Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts are ones that any Rare fan would love to have in their collections. Steven McCorkell’s collection includes almost every game Rare has made in the last three console generations, plus an impressive piece of signed Banjo-Tooie artwork. Also pictured here is a collection sent in by ‘Tony’, who says that Rare games made him the person he is today. We hope that doesn’t mean he spends all day foraging for chocolate coins in his garden.
Apr 2011
March Twitbook Medley
Here we go, here we go, here we go – it’s got very little to do with football, it’s our March social media round-up. Effortless chant creation there, should be setting the terraces alight in no time.
There was no stopping the Kinect Sports funk train… thing… in March, with Rare’s first BAFTA of the decade followed by a talk down in London and a landmark deal with Sky panel show A League of Their Own. Sports was also living the dream at one of the first game shows of the year, PAX East, while March was tidily bookended by charity events featuring the game, from the BackSpin 2011 tournament to StickTwiddlers‘ record-breaking Edinburgh session. Splendid fellows, all of them. And the ladies.
The Rare site was packed with Sports game guides, interviews and all sorts throughout March, best left to the monthly news round-up if for some flimsy, superficial reason you haven’t scoured them from beginning to end already. Elsewhere in the mythical Kingdom of Internets, we picked up on Rare games surfacing in features such as Game Informer‘s Essential Xbox Live Arcade List, GamesRadar‘s 10 Greatest Years in Videogame History, 1UP‘s Top 5 Video Game Crossovers and ShortList‘s Video Games Better than the Movie they Came From, while Rareware Archives‘ multiple timezone-spanning Grabbed by the Ghoulies secrets guide was no slouch either.
In other tangential horseplay, our Twitpics continued the cake theme, we forged ahead with our campaign of unwanted end-of-week education, tried to avoid running over any wildlife and became even more bewildered than usual over hip modern Kinect Sports feedback such as this, this and this. If nothing else, we were pretty confident that this bloke enjoyed it.
As always, our Twitter and Facebook pages are active and excitable and ready to welcome you with open virtual arms (as is our separate Sports Facebook page). So don’t be a stranger. Or at least any stranger than all the other nutters we associate with. Boom!
Apr 2011
