Nov 26, 2010 14:33 GMT  ·  By

The Kinect motion controller from Microsoft was originally developed in order to bring Xbox 360 into a whole new world of gaming, so, from time to time, it's actually quite nice to see it being used for controlling some of the world's best-known titles, albeit not running on Microsoft's console.

So, after taking a look yesterday at an implementation of the hacked Kinect used for playing a nice little game of Quake via an iMac, it's now about time to check out something ever more classic than that, namely the very famous Super Mario Bros.

The hacked Kinect was tweaked to run the aforementioned game by the same guy (yankeyan) who's come up with that real-time LightSaber effect we've talked about a while ago.

According to his own comments, yankeyan programmed the Kinect in order to recognize his motions and then transmit them to the NES emulator software, the first part of the process involving the use of the OpenKinect drivers while the second FCEUX.

Furthermore, it would seem that the developer is actively working on an easy to use application that will enable every Kinect owner to replicate his experience, without giving much though to the programming part of it.

As you can see for yourselves from the video we've embedded at the end of this article, playing Super Mario Bros using the Kinect is quite a difficult task, especially if you plan to do it as realistically as possible (namely, by running around, jumping, etc.).

This actually leaves us wondering just a little bit as to what titles Microsoft's partners will come up with and whether we'll actually ever see a Mario Bros version designed for the Kinect, that would provide certain features designed specifically for it.

Oh well, perhaps one day we'll see a legit Mario title for Kinect, but until then, we'll keep an eye out for what yankeyan and others like him are up to.