Xbox Live Vision

UNO also supports the camera, allowing you to see as well as hear your opponents during multiplayer games, and a fair amount of people were taking advantage of this when we plugged in - not surprising, since you get UNO free when you buy the camera. Texas Hold 'Em poker will soon follow (er) suit, thanks to a patch set to go live in a couple of weeks, while Activision's World Series of Poker game is said to make more extensive use of it. Ooh, eh?

Meanwhile, on the novelty front, facial mapping options will be offered by Ubisoft as part of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas. Thanks to Digimask technology, you'll be able to take a couple of pictures of your head and then sit back and watch it generate an approximation to appear on your in-game character, which should add some spice to multiplayer.

But, you're probably wondering, what of that TotemBall game? Worth it?

Well, at an inviting price of £0.00, it's certainly worth downloading - but we probably wouldn't base the Vision purchase on it, since it suffers from the same sort of problems that EyeToy action games do.

A 3D platformer primarily, the idea is to move your arms up and down along input areas located at either side of the screen, which use your hand positions to input tank-track like controls to direct your little on-screen character. You raise your arms together to move forward, lower them together to go backward, and turn by holding them at diagonals.

As you go, you pick up lots of shiny little objects that contribute to your score, but the overall goal is to collect little totems partly buried in the ground, which then leap up onto your little turtle-man's head and play part of a tune - with the music changing in variety and depth as you gather more totems.

It's very intuitive, as you'd expect, but as with most EyeToy games that use this sort of control method, your arms get tired pretty quickly. And as your arms droop, so precise control becomes more difficult to sustain.

Still, at least the developer recognises this, and has built in the gaming equivalent of rest-stops - pick up a bed icon and you're allowed to rest for a few seconds, while platforms that hold you steady and ferry you to a new play area also encourage you to rest your arms. The readout of scores at the end of a level is deliberately staggered, too, giving you a chance to rebuild your strength.

In contrast, there's also an achievement called "Fit Player", which rewards you with some points if you can keep going for 20 minutes on one level without resting.

It's an enjoyable enough game then, and also features pinball bonus levels where you flap a hand left or right to operate the flippers, and a two-player "juggling" mode where one player flaps and the other presses buttons in time to juggle the totems bouncing along on the turtle's head. Those with strong arms will certainly get several hours of entertainment out of finishing the single-player game, with lots of achievements based on endurance - high scores, skipping off the water 100 times, completing levels against the clock without losing lives, and so on.

Even so, it feels like a game designed to fit awkward controls - and reminiscent of older EyeToy games released when the novelty factor was still riding high.