'Star Wars Kinect' memes give goofy Xbox 360 game a glorious second life
"I'm feelin' like a star, you can't stop my shine!"
Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order might have given fans the narrative-driven game they’d been waiting for, but the action-adventure title has been momentarily dethroned. Kinect Star Wars has made a glorious, meme-fueled comeback from its 2012 grave, just in time for The Rise of Skywalker.
Amid the excitement from the upcoming release of Episode IX and the update to Battlefront 2 the internet remembered the glorious hot mess that was Kinect Star Wars. Twitter users began spreading memes about the title around December 14, after a tweet from user Ajay went viral that was captioned, “LEAKED PALPATINE SCENE FROM THE RISE OF SKYWALKER.”
No spoilers, we promise.
The Xbox 360 exclusive used Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing peripheral. It came with four game modes, which included a story, but most importantly the Galactic Dance-Off option. Think, Dance Central but you can get Palpatine to hip thrust to deadmau5’s “Ghost N Stuff” like a K-Pop icon. Don’t worry, it gets better.
Kinect Star Wars includes 16 popular songs you can jam out to, but all of them are slight re-writes of their original version. So, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” is “Hologram Girl” (shoutout Princess Leia), La Roux’s “Bulletproof” was made into “Blasterproof”, and who could forget “I’m Han Solo” a remix of Jason DeRülo’s “Ridin’ Solo.”
Imagine getting down to these lyricas at the Cantina:
I’m feeling like a star,
you can’t stop my shine.
I’m lovin’ Cloud City,
my head’s in the sky.
I’m solo, I’m Han Solo.
I’m Han Solo.
I’m Han Solo, Solo.”
It’s no real mystery why Kinect Star Wars is going through a meme renaissance, it’s cringy in all the right ways. The game even gets C-3PO to explain the dancing mode. It was a pesky corrupted file in the Jedi Archives.
LucasArts and developer Terminal Reality were clearly trying to have some fun with motion controls and improve upon the concept that The Force Unleashed on Wii introduced in 2008. But the main story didn’t stick the landing.
Former IGN editor Anthony Gallegos said that Kinect Star Wars’s motion controls were hit or miss. This resulted in the game flip-flopping between being “immersive to monumentally frustrating. The title’s Metacritic score rests at a meager 55 with an even worse 3.6 User Score.
User ZealousDragoon called it “one of the worst” Star Wars games in existence. Granted, that might not be too far off, but go watch some Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi gameplay and tell me how you feel afterwards.
No matter how you feel about The Rise of Skywalker or Jedi Fallen Order, you can always make Han Solo twerk in Kinect Star Wars.
