NASA Offers Free Mars Rover Landing Kinect Game For Xbox 360

If you're the sort of geek who likes video games and space, NASA and has a new, free, video game available for the Xbox 360. The free game is called Mars Rover Landing for Microsoft Xbox Kinect and uses the Kinect accessory for control. The game is to promote the landing of the Curiosity rover.

It's a tie-in with the 7 minutes of terror landing sequence that Curiosity will go through as it makes its way to the surface of the red planet. The screen shots of the video game remind me a bit of an arcade game I played growing up, but the name of the game escapes me. It was one of those standup arcade cabinets with horrible black and white graphics that has a single large lever on the front that you used to control the altitude of a lander trying to touch down on the surface of the planet.

From what I can tell of the Kinect video game, the goal is to set the Curiosity rover down as close to the center of the landing zone as possible before the tethered lander craft runs out of fuel and crashes. The graphics actually look very good and the game is rated E for everyone. You can download game right now at this link.

[via Wired]