This week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) Microsoft showed off their upcoming answer to the Nintendo Wii, code-named Project Natal.

Microsoft is having to play catch up with the Wii with it's simple-to-use controllers but has gone one step further by removing the controller all together - effectively making you the controller! You control your character by acting with your own body and a device sitting under your TV tracks your movements.

Those of you with Play Stations will know that so far this is nothing new. Sony has a product for the Play Station called the Eye-Toy which tracks the player's movements and is supported by a handful of party-style games.

Though I don't own a Play Station I feel fully qualified to say that Project Natal (once they come up with a better name) will be much more successful than the Eye-Toy. I can see a whole bunch of games coming up with inventive uses of it. In the E3 demo they showed a racing game where a kid was steering by moving her hands around an imaginary steering wheel and when she pulled into the pits her dad had to jump up and mime changing her tyres (corny but creative)! Another demo I saw was a paint application where a user would pick a colour then throw imaginary paint onto the TV screen.

With the camera comes facial recognition. So you could set it to automatically log your account into Xbox Live when it sees your face - pretty neat. On top of facial it also supports voice recognition so you could use voice commands to navigate through the Xbox dashboard and speak commands/answers to games.

Although, having said how cool it looks I have to say I have my doubts. In the promo video there seemed to be a bit of lag at times (which I'm not surprised by but would suck) and at other times the character on screen seemed to move before the person did in real life - hmmm, can you say smoke and mirrors?

Also, in reality I'm just not big on this sort of interaction in games. Having played Wii games and consistently having my bowling balls curve into the right gutter no matter how much freaking left spin I put on them I have to say I much prefer the precision and responsiveness of a traditional controller with thumb-sticks/d-pads! Also, can you imagine how much of a work-out this Project Natal will be? I mean at least with Wii Sports you eventually work out you can accomplish those same massive slams you've been doing in Tennis with a simple flick of the wiimote. There will be no cheating like that in Natal though! I can imagine it now, in order to play the next version of Halo, one of the game's requirements will be you being as fit as an actual soldier! I guess I can kiss any gaming prowess I thought I had good-bye! lol

Here's the video I was referring to.

Being fans of Guitar Hero 3 for X-Box 360 we decided to buy Guitar Hero World Tour.

We bought the full kit which includes:

• A much better looking guitar: check out that beautifully vanished plastic base!

• A rocking USB microphone:

• And perhaps most exciting: the drum kit:

Star Power on the drums?

So it doesn't take a genius to work out that if tilting one's axe activates star power for a guitarist then tilting the drum kit must activate it for a drummer!

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to activate star power on our defective drum kit. In fact there must have been something really wrong with our drum kit because I was completely rubbish at it, lol.

At least that's what I thought until my diva wife pushed me off and jumped on! ;-)

In fact, Jules got so into it she didn’t even notice part of the drum kit break and fly right off as she hammered down on the kit!!

In all seriousness though, we had the kids on the weekend and all four of us played in a band together. It was great family fun. Chloe played lead guitar, Alex played bass, I played the drums (mainly cause neither of the kids wanted to, lol) and Jules showed us she's a closet rapper on the mic! Her rendition of "No Sleep Til Brooklyn" would have made the Beasty Boy's proud! lol ;-)

Another thing that's been consuming our time over Xmas has been this prezzy that I bought Jules. It's called Khet (formerly known as Deflexion).

It's a board game played by 2 people. Each player has a laser on their end of the board and most of the pieces have mirrors on them. You move or rotate your pieces to manipulate how the laser beams bounce around the playing field. When a piece is struck by a laser and it doesn't have a mirror or it's mirror is facing away from the laser then that piece is removed from the board. The end-goal of the game is to blast a hole through your opponents pharaoh (the symbolic equivalent of a king in chess).

Sadly the lasers in the game are a little weak - it only slightly tingles when you put your tongue on them! So I raided all the remote controls around the house and wired the lasers directly into a huge 128 array of AA batteries!

It says on the box not to stare directly into the lasers so I made sure to only stare at the reflection of them, you know, to see if there would be any new side effects yet. In short, the good news is we were able to sell our toaster this week, lol. ;-)