Yoostar 2: In The Movies

The Short

Pros
- Act in REAL MOVIES!
- A good 50 odd film clips to insert yourself or friends into
- Playing the game with friends can be pretty amusing
- Decent mix across genres, styles, and time
- Can upload your videos online and share them with friends

Cons
- Kinect's video recording camera looks like absolute garbage, especially next to the movie clips
- Doesn't do a good job cropping/trimming your images, and the mic is also pretty bad
- Most clips from famous movies aren't "that clip," you know, the one you actually want to perform
- Menus are clunky and hard to navigate with Kinect interface
- Doesn't have any replay value beyond a novelty you show friends

The GiantBomb bros reenact Norbit, a classic for the ages. 

The Long

The idea behind Yoostar 2 SHOULD work. Being able to insert ourselves into our favorite movies to reenact (or just act stupid) sounds both hilarious and fun, and doing it with a friend would only enhance the experience. The makers of Yoostar went so far as to say that "Yoostar will do for movies what Guitar Hero did for rock."

...yeah, it sure did. That's why I got this game off a clearance rack at K-Mart for $5. Infinite replay value. 

No sense of scale, here. 

As stated, the concept of Yoostar 2 sounds appealing. The game gives you a very wide range and selection of movies and TV to choose from, each with their own iconic moments. You can then insert yourself as one of the characters in the scene, the game will prompt you to speak the required lines at the right times, and then replay it for you. It sounds like it would be great to mess up your favorite movies, and it...sort of is, until you realize the game isn't doing half of what you think it is. 

The game only notices sound, and only if it's making noises at the right time. It can't check actual words (much like Rock Band and other singing games), it doesn't have any scenes that require actual movement (which, given the Kinect's capabilities, is the biggest loss for me), and can't sense facial expressions or anything like that. So you are pretty much just playing karaoke, except instead of singing you are reciting movie lines (or just making up your own, which I did for a certain Terminator scene). 

Acting masters. 

Once you do a scene once, you probably won't want to do it again. Luckily there's a lot here...but I swear their selection isn't very good when it comes to actual scenes from the movies. And why the heck is Norbit in this game? Norbit is like the worst movie ever! And while it's funny to be Derek Zoolander once, if you don't have friends in the room to laugh at your performance you feel pretty lame. And alone. And friendless.

But these conceptual issues have nothing on the technical problems, most of which stem from the Kinect camera itself.

First off, the microphone in the Kinect, which the game uses to record all the lines. I'll be frank: that mic is a piece of crap. I have no idea why it is so bad, but when it comes to recording things it just sounds terrible. The game makes no attempt to adjust your voice or input so that it matches the other actors in the movie (to provide a sense of volume balance) so often I'll be WAY LOUDER than the movie I'm in. The camera also picks up every little thing, so you can get bad scoring by just having a friend laugh at your antics in the background. Awesome. 

The movie selection is mostly good, but with a lot of bad. 

But the ultimate offense is how badly you look after rehearsing. The Kinect's actual camera (vs the infared one) is pretty bad, making the video quality look worse than something I would have recorded off my Razr phone back in 2004. And while I can understand it might be hard to sufficiently "crop" someone's body from the background, if you have long hair (like me) or move a lot it'll often lose you and cut body parts off. Bad trimming with bad recording makes you look like a fuzzy home video cardboard cutout, which is completely unappealing to watch. 

WHICH DEFEATS THE POINT OF THE ENTIRE GAME.

Gettin' ready to "act"

Perhaps the most damning problem with Yoostar 2 revolves back to my original complaints: there is no longevity here. Yeah, it makes for a fun time if it's the first time your friends have seen it, and you might get a few laughs out of ruining some movies (because, seriously, acting them out is boring), but after four or five scenes most people are done, and once you've seen it once you've seen it forever. It isn't like Rock Band where I'll replay games over and over for higher scores, mostly because the gameplay in Rock Band is fun, and acting out scenes in Yoostar 2 is frustrating and dull. Luckily I only paid $5 for this game on super-clearance, and even then I'm not sure I got my money's worth. 

Oh yeah, navigating the menus sucks too, but that' par for the course with Kinect games. 

Yoostar 2 looks appealing on the store shelf. It looks like you'll have a total blast, a really fun time with friends and you goof off and reenact the "THIS IS SPARTA!" scene from 300. But after a few clips you and your friends will be bored and have a weird sense of awkwardness. Did I enjoy this? Was it actually funny? Or was it just really awkward? Maybe it would be better after a few drinks, but I can't attest to that either way. 

It's hard for me to even recommend this as a gimmick game. Like I said, $5, still not sure if I got my money's worth. If someone gives it to you for free then I guess it might be worth your time. But, honestly, this game is just a slew of broken promises, bad tech, and awkwardness. There are better Kinect games if you want to show off your new toy, so go get some of those instead. 

One out of five stars. 

Meet the Fockers. Another classic.