Kinect Play Fit Boldly Goes Where Nintendo Already Went

Ripping off Nintendo innovations and repackaging them for double the price with half the inspiration is a long-standing tradition for both Microsoft and Sony. Sony's most recent foray in to the venerated field was the PlayStation Move, which was clearly completely unlike the Wiimote and totally didn't come out several years after the fact with little to no added functionality. Microsoft has moved on from simply getting in on the motion control frenzy to copying actual Nintendo game concepts; in this case, Wii Fit or, as Microsoft would prefer you remember it, Kinect Play Fit.

To be fair, Kinect Play Fit isn't even a game. It's a process that runs alongside "most" Kinect titles and uses the Joule, a heart rate monitor peripheral, though the Joule is not explicitly necessary for Kinect Play Fit use. The process tracks exercise across multiple applications and saves the data via Microsoft's cloud. The feature is being introduced through a dashboard update for all users, though there is no indication of whether it will be restricted to Gold users. We suspect so, given that the Kinect Play Fit system uses the cloud, which is a Gold-only feature. Hopefully it won't cost anything beyond that.