Of the 16 completely new games announced at Microsoft’s press conference yesterday, including a batch of 5 smaller Xbox Live Arcade titles, 8 of them were either Kinect-required or Kinect-enabled. Of the 27 games that were either announced or receiving some sort of feature-unveiling, 11 involved Kinect in one way or another. So for those of you who dropped some hard-earned cash on the watchful little peripheral and were greeted with impressive but rather unfulfilling minigame compilations, breathe a sigh of relief that Microsoft seems to at least attempt to follow through on evolving how the technology integrates into games. I’ll break down specific titles after the jump.

I wouldn’t rank on-rails shooters as one of the top tier of video game genres, but it seems to be something Microsoft is trying to push with Kinect. A new Fable title throws familiar sorts of enemies at the screen, which the player must blast away using hand motions to control some flashy wizardry. I always vastly preferred charging into Fable combat with hammer swinging and gun blazing, so I’ll feel a little left out of this thing is an adventure for magicians only. Similarly, Kinect Star Wars seems to hold the player on a set path for some light saber-slinging goodness, that seems to finally deliver my dream of taking a mighty for-the-fences Ryan Howard baseball swing to reflect a Star Wars laser shot. It’s worth noting a different trailer for this thing showed some promise for the game to change up the action a bit.

Another angle that the Kinect has taken is to use its technology to augment existing controller options. Mass Effect 3 will include voice commands for both conversation (meh) and combat assignments (interesting), while the Ghost Recon will allow both voice commands and hand gestures to control squadmates. The idea of using the Kinect’s technology to allow controls for squad shooters like these two games means that the player could be freed to assign buttons for other tasks, if desired. I have to wonder why no hand gestures for Mass Effect, though, that would seem to make sense. At least four of the upcoming year’s worth of EA Sports games will all have Kinect functionality: Madden NFL 12, FIFA 12, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13 and an unannounced title (smart money’s on Fight Night). I’m going to wait until I see Kinect users beating traditionalists at Madden before I start calling the Kinect a game-changer for sports games, though.

Predictably, sequels to Dance Central and Kinect Sports were also announced. The former is exactly what you expect, but the latter adds golf, football, tennis, and skiing. Possibly the most interesting Kinect News was yesterday’s launch of Kinect Labs, an SDK for Kinect developers and homebrew wizards. With all the blow-my-mind Kinect mods already popping up, I’ll be interested to see if the public is able to apply this creativity to some legit games. Lastly, the hit iPhone game Fruit Ninja will be getting an XBLA Kinect version that will make the slicing and chopping feel a little more true-to-life than it does with the existing finger-tapping controls. I highly recommend the trailer, it looks like a Ninja is beating the living piss out of the cast of the Fruit of the Loom commercials.

(Credit to IGN for uploading all the trailers except the ones from 1up and GameTrailers.com, and to Joystiq and Destructoid for the linked articles.)