Game Reviews

Go out and get in your car. Start the engine and stand up, so that your head is sticking out of the sunroof.

Recruit a stumpy helper to kneel at your feet. He or she will be accelerating and braking for you as you steam down the motorway - completely out of your control.
For a nice final twist, remove the steering wheel and get a boffin friend to replace it with an imperceptible camera to track your movements instead.

The calibration of the steering is very important, so make sure your chosen boffin is diligent: It needs to be impossibly sensitive. Shift your imaginary wheel an inch to the left, and the car should screech a full 45 degrees, usually smashing you into a rock face.Enjoy the drive!

Don't do any of that, obviously. You'll be arrested. And rightly so. You'll also probably die.

More to the point, it won't exactly be much of a thrill. You can sort of understand why criminals get an adrenalin rush from speeding away from a bank heist, or a daring smash and grab - and, therefore, why it's fun to play at doing so on a games console.

But the sunroof-stumpy-boffin-imaginary-wheel combo? That just sounds like hassle.

Astonishingly, some people at Microsoft thought this could be the basis for a fantastic Kinect launch game. A racing title in which you have to stand up while your avatar sits down? Who gave the rubber stamp to that? Even the boxart shows a smiley man driving whilst resting on his arse.