I’ve never woken up and thought to myself, “I just wanna dance.” Sure, some of you may have had those ideas, but I’m not in that boat. So when Harmonix took the stage at the Microsoft E3 press conference and showed off Dance Central, along with some extremely awkward producer dance moves, I didn’t think I’d ever want to touch the game. Fast forward two days to our appointment at the Harmonix booth and me taking the stage to play Dance Central. I got up there kicking and screaming, but left the stage with a big smile on my face. Dancing with Kinect is actually pretty fun.

From what we saw and what I got a chance to dance to, Dance Central has a solid soundtrack. With Rock Band-esque DLC planned, this could be a big hit. You learn dance routines through the game and Kinect detects your body movement to make sure you’re doing the moves just right. Harder difficulties introduce faster movement, more intense maneuvers, and all around insanity. The goal here is to make you a better dancer in real life, but I don’t see myself throwing elbows at a club anytime soon.

There was a half-second noticeable lag with Kinect where it wasn’t instantaneously recognizing your movement. At least it wasn’t instantly replaying the red-jello-blob video capture back on the screen instantly. The dance we performed on stage, to some song I’d never heard before, featured myself and two other E3 attendees. Only the front-most person was recognized by Kinect for the dance moves in the game. The camera could see us, but wasn’t paying attention to our move tracking. So unless Harmonix and Microsoft change how the system works, if you have grand plans of a Dirty Dancing style sequence, only the front person will have to pull off the moves precisely.

What surprised me was just how much fun I had playing Dance Central. Even thought I didn’t end up looking like a choreographer (and the woman dancing with us was a professional choreographer, so thanks for that, Harmonix), you’re still gonna have fun. I can see this being a huge hit with younger and female gamers, and the more hardcore male audience will jump in on a Friday night when drinking. The big issue facing the game is Kinect adoption rate, and at $150 for the device, I’m not sure Dance Central is going to pushing millions of units early on in its life cycle. Harmonix definitely did a great job with moving dancing games forward from DDR pads on the floor, so I want to see this continue in the years to come. Now go watch me dance in the video below and laugh at my inability to go in the same direction as everyone else with my dance moves.