"Kinect PlayFit," first seen in leaks, is now officially announced – and officially released today! That means we can finally understand what Kinect PlayFit is: a special "fitness dashboard" that tracks your calories lost across multiple Kinect games, "from Dance Central 2 to Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 to Kinect Star Wars," according to Microsoft.

The dashboard also features leaderboards and social "activity challenges," two ideas that probably either motivate you to keep up your fitness routine or make you feel very uncomfortable, depending on how fit you already are. It even has its own Achievements.

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'Silver Lining' is a column from freelancer Taylor Cocke dedicated to highlighting moments of real potential in less than perfect games. This week he examines From Software's Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor.
An interesting thing happened to me within the first hours of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor. I started to actually care about the computer controlled soldiers confined to the chassis of my hulking Vertical Tank. Natch and Parker's voices would have been out of place as bad 80s stereotypes. But as the pair reloaded our tank's weapons, spewed tactical advice in my ear, and repaired our VT from encounters, I came to know them as more than chatty computer characters. They were compatriots.

And then I'd aim down the sites to see enemy tanks, and do my absolute best to keep myself and my team alive – a difficult feat due to Steel Battalion's atrocious Kinect controls. My enemies were mechanical monsters, sent to destroy everything that I held dear. In early cinematics, they were shown as faceless killing machines, slaughtering men, women, and children indiscriminately.

In war, one of the most powerful motivational techniques is dehumanizing your enemy. Dehumanization can also be accomplished through the use of technology. Aiming down a long-range rifle's night vision scope doesn't exactly focus on the human elements at the end of the crosshairs. Drone strikes do away with even having to look at the person being shot at. And in Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, the player is literally separated from enemy combatants by walls of steel. There is no defining human factor on the battlefield, only the game of war.

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The latest round of fuel-injected and/or naturally aspirated DLC has hit Forza 4, bringing with it a swatch of blacktop devouring beasts from modern times and days gone by.

The aptly named July Car Pack, available today for 560 MS Points, features the following sick whips (in chronological order): The 1952 Hudson Hornet, 1954 Jaguar XK120, 1956 Lotus Eleven, 1973 AMC Gremlin X, 1995 RUF CTR2, 1998 Aston Martin V8 Vantage V600, 2011 McLaren 59 GT MP4-12C GT3, 2012 Spyker C8 Aileron, 2012 Ascari KZ1R and 2012 Mercedes-Benz SLK55 AMG, all of which can be seen in the trailer above and gallery below.

The recently announced Xbox Music service will feature both a subscription-based model and the ability to purchase individual tracks, according to a Bloomberg report. The service will reportedly allow users to stream music for a monthly or yearly subscription, in addition to traditional purchases.

Furthermore, an "online locker" of sorts may allow customers to store their music collections online for a fee, with the really intriguing part being that the locker could store music purchased from other services as well. As previously announced, said music will be playable across a range of devices, notably those that run Windows 8.

In other words, it sounds like Xbox Music will offer similar functionality to what is currently offered by the Zune service, with the added benefit of having a name that isn't associated with grim failure.

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Microsoft's Kinect accelerator program, furnished by entrepreneurship incubator TechStars, recently gave 11 teams 13 weeks and $20,000 each to polish their motion-sensing ideas and present them to a team of investors this Thursday in Seattle. The startups range from a system that allows surgeons to navigate MRI and CT scans in the operating room, to an in-store camera system that tracks shoppers' behavior. Another turns any surface into a 3D, multi-touch screen for Windows.

Many of the startup ideas offer an attempt to bring Kinect into the wider, physical world, rather than limit it to living rooms and virtual baby tigers. Of the final creations, three are made for the medical field, four are based in tracking or innovating consumer behavior, two are animation-based, one can help athletes train and one is that awesome 3D surface app.

Microsoft is accepting applications for its fall 2012 accelerator class, Windows Azure and cloud-based startups, right here. Below check out the full descriptions of all 11 entrants, as provided by Microsoft.

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In this editorial, regular Joystiq contributor Kat Bailey examines the trends Microsoft should consider for its next generation console.
Want to know something amazing? The Xbox 360 has been around nearly twice as long as the original Xbox, and we've yet to hear a hint from Microsoft about its next console. Instead, the hardware manufacturer is happy to keep moving along for another year with Halo 4, Gears of War: Judgment, and even more Kinect games, secure in the knowledge that the Xbox 360 is among the company's most successful products.

To be sure, Microsoft is in a much better place now than seven years ago. After four years of running an unprofitable second to Sony, Microsoft was more than ready to move on from what the company had openly described as a test bed. In fact, Microsoft was so desperate to get its console to market that the company was willing to ignore technical problems that would go on to cost them more than a billion dollars. And much as that hurt, Microsoft (if not its customers) would probably still say that the headstart was worth it.

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In Skyrim's "Dawnguard" DLC, I became a vampire. I feasted on the blood of the living. I propelled myself forward at super vampire speed with my leathery grey vampire lord wings. I sapped the energy of my enemies with one boney claw while raising the dead to fight for me with the other, growing my powers ever stronger. I even turned into a swarm of bats and flitted across a room.

It's not as fun as it sounds.

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Haunt, NanaOn-Sha's Kinect-based haunted house adventure is free from now through July 2 – but only if you download it through the "Kinect Central" app on your Xbox 360's dashboard.

Sure, late June isn't exactly the season for spookiness, but Haunt isn't meant to be all that spooky anyway. Think "whimsical." Think "Tim Schafer's voice." Besides, something had to alert us to the existence of the "Kinect Central" doodad.

Of the games shown at E3, The Last of Us has been named the best of them, according to the Game Critics Awards, the honors given to games by a shadowy secret cabal of attending journalists. Naughty Dog's survival game earned "Best of Show," "Best Original Game," "Best Console Game," and "Best Action/Adventure Game," along with a "Special Commendation for Sound."

There were a few awards that went to other games, surprisingly. Among the other big winners were the Wii U for Best Hardware, Dance Central 3 for Best Social/Casual Game and Best Motion Simulation Game, and Sound Shapes for Best Handheld/Mobile Game.

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The discounted 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle with bonus two-year contract is available now at participating Best Buy and GameStop locations. The basics of the deal (term used loosely): the package costs $99 upfront, with a 24-month contract at $14.99 a month, which will include Xbox Live Gold.

Sparing the need to whip out the TI-82 calculator, the cost of the contract would total roughly $460 over the next two years. A 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle currently has a suggested retail price of $299, with Xbox Live Gold at about $50 a year, for an eventual total of $399. Of course, all of this math is subject to change over the next two years at the potential whims of retailer deals or official console price drops.

Your chance to become a vampire lord and block out Skyrim's sun forever becomes (virtual) reality tomorrow with the launch of Skyrim's first major expansion, "Dawnguard." Of course, if you can't speak English (how are you reading this?!) but can speak French, Italian, German, or Spanish, it won't be available for another few weeks. If you speak something else ... well, you might be skunked. But again, you're probably not reading this if that's the case. Also, you smell like feet. Take that, person who can't understand what we're saying!

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You're reading Reaction Time, a weekly column that claims to examine recent events, games and trends in the industry, but is really just looking for an excuse to use the word "zeitgeist." It debuts on Fridays in Engadget's digital magazine, Distro.

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"Why don't you just do your job and review the game? Stop shoving your opinion down our throats!"

That's one bit of criticism, nested between comments both cordial and caustic, that I sometimes see at the bottom of Joystiq's thoughtful, pretentious, accurate and downright incorrect reviews (depending on whom you ask). For some, a bit of punditry only pollutes the product evaluation they signed up for. Less thought and more report, please.

That's not how game reviews work at all – not unless it's their goal to confirm factual observations about the video game, which is indeed functional and playable from the first-person perspective, and features a sequence of steadily increasing challenges that must be overcome with considered manipulation of the controller's buttons. And there are graphics!

But the ease at which the mythical "objective review" is dismissed nearly obscures an unusual facet of writing about games. When critics played Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor this week, they encountered a game that had clear, unavoidable faults beyond the usual suspects in level design, storytelling, play mechanisms, and emotions evoked by the premise. What happens when the game just fails to function properly?

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Retailer Game Australia will shut down all 31 of its remaining stores over the coming weeks, its administrator PricewaterhouseCoopers announced today. Game will close 16 Australian stores immediately and the remaining 15 within a few weeks.

In May, Game Australia entered voluntary administration; it shuttered 60 stores, affecting 264 employees, and cut 17 head office positions. Before any closures, Game had an estimated 500 employees in Australia.

"This is a difficult time for employees, and closing the stores was not a decision we made easily," Warwick said of Game Australia's complete closure (and the ones in May). "Despite exploring available opportunities for continued trading, the ongoing trading performance and absence of viable offers for the purchase of the business has resulted in these closures."

Game Australia is running discounts in a final closing-down sale online and in its remaining stores.

Soon you'll have new ways to earn Xbox Live Rewards. The official Twitter account for Microsoft's wing that incentivizes friend referrals and surveys with free MS Points has announced Achievement functionality is coming this fall. The problem is we don't exactly know what that means right now.

A tweet issued earlier today simply promises "a new way to earn Rewards based on your Achievements," coming this fall. We hope this means difficult Achievements will net us MS Points – we definitely deserve a bonus for earning all of the Achievements in Avatar: The Legend of Aang: The Burning Earth – but that's speculation until Microsoft gets back to us.

Update: Microsoft wouldn't go into specifics and instead offered us the following statement: "We don't have many details to provide at this time, but can say that based on our member feedback, we're constantly looking for ways to continue enhancing and improving our Xbox Live Rewards program."

• OXM (75/100): "Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor isn't for everyone. In fact, some people may be more turned off by the potential for error in its Kinect controls than by the Xbox version's overbearing, multi-button controller ... War has never been this intense, and you should try to take part."
• Destructoid (30/100): "At its core, it's a basic mech game with a "realistic and gritty" feel to it that you've seen a million times before. Maybe at some point, the Kinect requirement can be patched out of it. Until then, piloting these Vertical Tanks even while sober may result in a loss of brain cells."
• Game Informer (30/100): "The mech-combat genre isn't overflowing with alternatives, but they do exist. Save yourself the aggravation and pick any one of those. You won't do any worse."
• IGN (30/100): "Heavy Armor might be Kinect's most spectacular failure, but it's precisely because it's so ambitious. ... Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor deserves a lot of credit for sticking its neck out in an effort to craft a fresh videogame experience. It's one of the best ideas on Xbox this year, but ultimately it's also one of the system's worst games."
• Polygon (10/100): "I was never able to shake the feeling of watching through a window while someone else played Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor as I shouted suggestions and waved frantically, hoping they'd notice me. So, how is Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor as a game? I honestly have no clue. You'd have to ask the guy in the other room."

With my upper body poking through the hatch of my vertical tank – essentially a massive gun turret situated atop two equally massive, birdlike metal legs – I observe the surrounding landscape with a pair of binoculars. Spotting my target, I hop back into the cockpit of the VT as one of my crew members begins to crank the engine. I pull the activation lever, sending power to the VT's numerous systems: instrument panels, ammunition gauges and, most importantly, armaments and steering.

I lean into the viewport, watching through the tiny window as the VT rumbles forward and my remote target grows closer. Once we're within range, I pull down the periscope, which will lend much greater accuracy than the viewport's iron sights at this distance. Adjusting my aim slightly above the target, I let loose a shell. The armor-piercing round impacts the enemy VT's leg with such force that it is shorn clean off, sending the tank tumbling to the ground. I silently congratulate myself, but the celebration is cut short when an enemy shell comes screaming out of nowhere, slamming into our VT and knocking me back into my seat.

As my team and I regroup, a second shell rocks the cabin once more, shattering the viewport glass and filling the cockpit with smoke. The panel that houses the ventilator control is tucked away to the right. I pull it forward, lock it into place, reach for the ventilator chain and ... accidentally flick on the headlights. On my second attempt, instead of pulling the ventilator chain, I put the entire control panel away again. I pull the panel out again, reach for the ventilator chain and put the control panel away again. I pull the panel out a third time and reach very, very carefully for the ventilator chain ... at which point my entire crew dies of smoke inhalation.

The technology behind the Kinect is capable of enabling incredible fantasies, and it has allowed me to interact with virtual worlds in ways I never thought possible. What Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor has taught me is that, should that technology fail just once, the entire fantasy comes crashing down in an instant.

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