The skiing game was enjoyable enough, detecting slight variations in my lean to guide the on-screen skier down a pretty basic hill. The experience felt much smoother and more natural than similar games designed for the Wii balance board, which I usually find a bit twitchy in skiing simulations. I liked how the game recognized a low crouch as a way to improve aerodynamic speed, and how swooshing my arms at any time resulted in a satisfying ski pole push. Aside from some frequent graphical glitches (which made my skier look like he was showing off the bottom of his shoe), the demo was a great proof of concept.
The boxing gameplay, on the other hand, was not nearly as polished. It looked pretty good, to be sure, with a nice first-person perspective barely obscured by some large transparent boxing gloves. But the game had real trouble detecting a wide variety of punches, translating them to on-screen blows roughly 50 percent of the time. Even when a punch was detected, it took the form of a delayed, blurry wave of motion, rather than the accurate recreation of the actual punch I was expecting. Compared to my experience in Sony's The Fight demo or even boxing games on the Wii, it just didn't shape up.
I'm willing to give the still-in-development game the benefit of the doubt for now, but as of now it looks like it needs some serious elbow grease before its planned holiday 2010 launch.
