[caption id=“attachment_3693” align=“aligncenter” width=“490” caption=“RIVER RUSH, one of the KINECT ADVENTURES games”][/caption]

Last week we had a few GREAT trailers hit, but today we start with the heavy hitters.

At E3 2009, Microsoft blew everyone away with their reveal of Project Natal, a controller-less motion system for playing games and interacting with your XBox 360.  As many predicted, we will see a near final version of Natal at the Microsoft presser tomorrow, along with it’s title - the Microsoft Kinect.

As unveiled by USA Today, the controller-system is multi purpose, allowing you to control your system via facial recognition (to login to your XBox Live account) and physical gestures (to navigate menus, and sign into things such as your Netflix account), but the key thing is that you’ll be using the Kinect to control games.

The initial roster of games has been announced, and is as follows:

"¢Kinectimals lets you train and play with 20 different virtual cats, including a lion, cheetah and tiger.

"¢Joyride, a racing game, lets players use their hands to hold an imaginary steering wheel — pull your hands toward you and push back out for an acceleration boost — and their bodies to execute jumps and tricks.

"¢Kinect Sports has six activities including boxing, bowling, beach volleyball, track and field, soccer and table tennis. To serve a volleyball, you mimic the real motion; in soccer, you can kick the ball or do a header.

"¢Kinect Adventures includes a river-raft time trial and obstacle course, playable by up to four players. On the raft, playing as a duo, you and a partner must lean one way or another to steer. Jumping helps the raft reach special areas for extra points.

"¢Dance Central, in development by MTV Games, brings a So You Think You Can Dance experience home.

"¢Star Wars characters and iconic Disney favorites will be featured in separate new games being developed at Microsoft in conjunction with LucasArts and Disney.

I'm sure there are other titles in the works, and we'll be seeing much much more at Microsoft's press conference tomorrow (including a rumored relaunch of the 360 system itself), but this already is quite the strong offensive from the team in Redmond.

As a nerd and as of the writer of this blog, I can affirm that I'll be keeping an eye on everything big at E3 this week, and something tells me we haven't seen ANYTHING yet.