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Ubisoft tells locked-out NBA players to dance

If they take a challenge from Ubisoft, NBA players are about to make dance videos for a charity of their choice using the game developer's Just Dance 3.

John Lewinski
Crave freelancer John Scott Lewinski covers tech, cars, and entertainment out of Los Angeles. As a journalist, he's traveled from Daytona Beach to Cape Town, writing for more than 30 national magazines. He's also a very amateur boxer known for his surprising lack of speed and ability to absorb punishment. E-mail John.
John Lewinski
2 min read
Ubisoft

The NBA lockout is about to get really ugly. That's not due to some new twist in the union negotiations or some scheme by the owners--it's because it looks like a bunch of very tall men are going to dance and record it all for the world to see.

Ubisoft today announced a challenge to the out-of-work professional basketball players to benefit any charity of their choice. The stunt calls for locked-out National Basketball Association stars "to create a dance routine via the Just Create Mode on Just Dance 3 on Kinect for Xbox 360 for a chance to win a $25,000 donation to a charity of their choice."

Players will select a song and then do their favorite moves while the Kinect records their routine. They then name and save the dance to their Xbox 360 hard drive before uploading it to JustDancePlanet.com via Xbox Live. Ubisoft will pick the best entrants, and fans will vote to select the winner.

It's good news for the prospective charities, but it could be a painful reality for our eyeballs. The average big, lean, and powerful NBA player can run and jump with alacrity that defies his size. But that doesn't mean you want to see him trip the light fantastic.

To use a parallel scenario, have you ever seen an NBA player get in a fight on the court? When a man that big has to move outside the comfortable confines of a hoops court, that old high school slang insult "spaz" tends to leap to mind. And that comes from a man who has had that term applied to his own dancing often.

There's no word yet on which NBA players will take on the challenge or which charities will be in the running for the $25,000.