Forgive me, but before seeing this game for the first time, I have never heard of the show VICTORiOUS before. Supposedly, it is a super hot show on Nickelodeon right now that features a young girl named Tori Vega who acts and sings at her high school. I'm not one to really fact check these kind of things, so we'll just go with that. Anyway, there's this new game called VICTORiOUS: Time to Shine that will be arriving for Xbox 360 and it will fully utilize the Kinect.

I recently saw a very early build of VICTORiOUS: Time to Shine in action. The game includes a handful of different modes, all of which use a different function that the Kinect brings to the table. The first part is acting. These acting sessions have the player do poses and absurd stances that I don't really consider acting. The better you do, the more extravagant the stage becomes. The whole thing is not very hard to do, and also not very complicated.

The next mode I saw was the singing. Singing was like a karaoke machine that does not pick up on pitch or volume while you're playing, and the folks showing the game off even mentioned that you can get through this mode by simply humming or jibbering words. I guess they were going more for casual and fun, and less on accuracy and real singing. It's a nice gesture, but I interpret it as an insult to our kids. Give them SOME credit.

Dancing is another mode in this game, and it's similar to what we saw in acting. The on-screen action shows you what you have to do, and you have to mimic what is being done. Sounds lame, right? However, it all makes sense in the end that all these modes seem so shallow, because there is a music video mode that blends all this together. If the game had all these together in the first place, then maybe the game's depth wouldn't seem so low or cheapened. Maybe there's more to it that I haven't seen, but this is all that I saw on this day. Editing and directing will also be a part of this game, so maybe that will clear things up if and when I see this game again.

Overall, I feel that this game is an attempt to be an expansion of games like Just Dance and Dance Central, but doesn't get one part right. I know it's a game for kids, but I think even kids want a game that brings more challenge than this. I don't think you can fail at this game. Maybe I'm crazy and maybe the game is too early in development to give a good sense of the game, but that's how I feel about VICTORiOUS: Time to Shine so far.