Games

MOTIONSPORTS (Xbox 360; RRP €49.99) is a horrible game that makes Microsoft’s Kinect look like a bad joke, one that Christmas consumers will be duped into paying for.

Motionsports is the definition of ‘shovelware’, terrible software made only to capitalise on a new console or hardware.

In this case that hardware is Kinect — the camera that lets you control games through your body movements.

This collection of six sports games is at best pointless and, at worst, downright broken. There’s the skiing, which doesn’t detect your turns properly, leaving you to careen from side to side. Then there’s the American football, where both throwing the ball and running-back exercises bear no relation to the real thing and are sluggish and boring to boot.

The hang-gliding, meanwhile, is arguably the most pointless game of the year, asking you to keep your arms stretched out to the side — like an aeroplane — for minutes on end.

As for the boxing, it fails to detect almost all of your punches, something of an obvious disadvantage in that particular sport.

The most insulting of the lot, however, is surely the football. Aside from terrible penalty shootouts, there’s the ground-breaking ‘Midfield Kick’, a game that challenges you to kick a ball from the centre spot into an open goal. Shocking stuff.

Kinect is a far better piece of technology that Motionsports implies and deserves better software than this. Unfortunately, with limited competition on the shelves, shoppers might be tempted to buy Motionsports regardless. If you’re one of them, then the joke’s on you.