The set up itself was brilliant. There were free, chilled cokes available to all and the stuff were amazingly friendly and chirpy without being condescendingly American. This was a direct opposite to the f*cking morons at the new Apple store in the area who were clapping and cheering every punter than entered the premises.

Everyone who attended the Kinect Gallery (as it was called) was given a 30-minute playing slot and then escorted down to showroom lounges where they were assigned their own personal guide and could sit and watch their mates playing whilst waiting for a go.

One thing that I especially liked was that the players were all recorded and the videos of them playing uploaded to kinect.me where they could log in using their booking reference number and watch their videos.

The number of games that could be played was limited by the number of people in your party i.e. if you had six people you would play six games.

So, on to the game that we were able to play.

KinectAdventures
This is the game that everyone has seen on the demos, the Gadget Show featured it in their slot for E3 (along with Forza Motorsport) and there are a number of videos showing it on YouTube.

One of the levels of this game is the white water rafting. This can be a one- or two-player game with the latter emphasising team play.

Players steer the boat by leaning left and right and make it jump by jumping up. To go faster they lean in towards the screen. The idea is make your way down the river by going through gates, collecting numerous star tokens and using ramps to jump and get airborne.

What I especially liked about this game was the emphasis on team play. If one player went to the left and the other to the right, the boat just kept going forward, slamming into whatever obstacle was in front.

Another cool feature of Kinect and one which was exploited to good effect in the game is the ability to work out exactly what position the player's body is in. This meant that if I did a star jump, my avatar would do a star jump. This is key to the game as there is no physical way of getting the stars without being able to do star jumps, straight jumps with your hands above your head an any manner of other positions.

The second adventure game we played was a straight-out race on platforms which were mounted on rails. The start was especially good as you had to reach out as if you were grabbing rails and then pull hard to get started. In order to keep up momentum you had to jump up and down on the sport. As you did so you approached obstacles that you had to either jump over, duck under, or dodge to the left or right.

This is the game that I really struggled with. My depth perception was completely out and I spent more time with stars about my head than I did actually making my way through the course. There was no indication as to when to actually try to dodge the obstacles and my pathetic depth perception meant that I was jumping, ducking and dodging far too late.

Needless to say I lost this game and was glad of the comfy sofa and free Coke (did I mention the free Coke) in order to chill down (I was sweating like the proverbial) and get my breath back whilst my gobby mates (and gobbier wife) tried their hand at the game.

This game is the best dance game that I've played before. I was always put off buying dance games for the Xbox as I didn't want to have to fork out cash for the game and then cash for the dance mat as well.

With Dance Central you're getting a game that is ready to go straight out of the box. No extras needed, no dance mat that bows under your weight or which moves along the floor as you do the more energetic dances and no need for a shed load of £1 coins as you shake ya thang down at the arcade.

I played the easy level of Poison (hey, I was being watched not only by my mates, but most of the Microsoft crew and a number of other punters) and even that was more of a workout than I was expecting.

Dance Central is cleverly set up so that you only have to mirror the moves of the dancers on screen. If you follow the top link in this article and look at photo 3 you will see how the game tells you which move needs to be performed and which moves are following.

Fortunately, as with songs, the Dance Central dances appear to have 'choruses' and you can therefore quickly pick up on some of the moves that you're expected to do more than once.

The game appears to score based on how well you mirror the actual moves and not on whether you do something appearing to be the move. The best thing about this for me is that you actually IMPROVE your dancing ability.

All-in-all this is most likely going to be the game to watch. It's going to appeal to frustrated daddy dancers like myself and keep millions of little girls (such as my daughters) engrossed for hours. The workout it provides will also help somewhat to banishing the fat-arse stereotype that gamers are often stuck with. This is definitely on my 'to buy list'. Pop over to Amazon using the links provided and you'll save yourself at a fiver on the games compared to other shop sites.

This is a game that the fat-arse gamers will hate! There's no shilly-shallying in this game, no half-arsed 'jogging' on the spot. It's a full-on sprint to the finish. I played the hurdles game against a friend.

Assuming the standing sprint position we awaited the starter's pistol. With a crack we were gone. Our avatars hurtled along the track and headed towards the first of the hurdles.

'Wait for it to turn green' shouted our chirpy little beardy Microsoft guy.

With a loud clunk we completely failed to clear the hurdles, our avatars slamming into and through them. It was at this point that my worthy opponent decided that jumping was too hard (he was 6'4" after all) and that running through the rest of them was a better (if not exactly fair) way of winning the race.

Being a gaming professional I persisted in my efforts to actually jump the bloody things and tried jumping when the hurdles turned yellow. The thing with them either being yellow or green was that they turned colour bloody miles away from the actual hurdle. The fact that you're running as hard on the spot as possible makes it quite hard to go from running on the spot to jumping on the spot. It's actually easier to run normally and jump a hurdle than it is to run on the spot and go from that to jumping. The result was that my mate just ran through the hurdles and won, whereas I tried to jump and lost.

Winner and loser both were knackered at the end of the race and the sweat was truly running freely. All-in-all it was a good game and I can see a lot of competitiveness coming to the fore as grandma tries to run the kids into the ground, but I hope that the finished game rewards actually trying to play it properly (such as Dance Central) rather than allowing people to take shortcuts.

The Kinect is going to change the face of gaming forever. Science fiction meets science fact and gives games of all types the opportunity to play. The Wii and PSMove are both dependant upon the gamer being able to hold a minimum of one controller whereas the Kinect does not discriminate in this way. Granted I haven't seen how wheelchair bound players will be affected but I was able to watch a one-handed girl playing whilst I was at galleries and she was able to play seamlessly.

I am very interested in seeing how first-person shooters will work, sadly enough I'm already thinking it's going to be along the lines of 'Gamer', in which case it will be very cool indeed!

As a martial artist since 1991 I'm also very interested in seeing the UFC training game and any other martial arts-based games. The potential it has for complimenting class-based training with home-based practice is immense.

Without wanting to sound too much like a fanboy. Kinectic FTW!