When Kinect was first rumoured (known at that time as Project Natal) I was so excited about the prospect and thought it sounded extremely promising. I waited, for what seemed like years, for the product to finally come to fruition and when Kinect finally launched I grabbed one, along with the bundled Kinect Adventures game.

Set up was fairly straighforward, consisting of unpacking the box contents, connecting the Kinect sensor to a plug socket and also to the Xbox 360 via USB. The software on the Xbox will then take you through the setup of the sensor and get it up and running within a few minutes so you can start playing games with Kinect.

The first thing that became apparent when using Kinect was that you need a LOT of space in front of your telly! For single player games you can make do with about 6-7' sqaure of space, but for 2 people to play together you'll need more like 8-10' square space in front of the Kinect bar. So relegate the large coffee table to the hall and part your sofas, because if you want to play Kinect games safely, you'll need more space than you likely have immediately available!

Once you get set up and make room to play, the games can begin. Kinect adventures itself is filled with various fun mini-games (for want of a better word) that demonstrate the sensor well, and introduce you to the ways of Kinect and what it's capable of. The game isn't super impressive, but it is a lot of fun to play, and does a good job of showing off the new technology.

The Kinect sensor itself is very impressive, constantly tracking your body and capturing even your smallest movements. It works really well and I found it more responsive than I assumed it would be. I was extremely impressed with the technology and how clever it was, along with how well it worked in general.

In time, the novelty of Kinect wore off, since after the initial thrill of Kinect Adventures and Kinect Sports, there wasn't a great deal left for me. There were a few childish games that I was not interested in, but there was the promise of bigger and better games in the pipeline, with exciting ideas for how the sensor would enhance future big release titles. This never really happened, in my opinion, and even now I only have Kinect Sports Season 2 in addition to the older games, which is another good addition to the range but again, the novelty soon wears off. Ultimately, I am very disappointed with the progress of Kinect and the lack of big budget games enhanced for Kinect control. The technology is there, and it works a treat, but developers are not making use of it as they should be.

One other issue is that, because the sensor relies on ambient light to help track body movements, you cannot play in a darkened room, or, for example, using a projector (as I would have liked) because for the projected image to look its best, I use it in the dark, but this is not very good for use with Kinect because the lack of light makes the sensor less reliable and not so responsive.