I’m not a fan of racing simulators but I do love racing titles like Burnout or Blur so when I walked into the Joy Ride room at E3 I was in two minds about whether or not this was going to be any good or not.

I went first and very quickly realised that this was no racing simulator at all, I stood in front of the camera and stuck out my arms feeling only a little silly and was instantly picked up by Kinect… the journo next to me however didn’t have as much luck and while it picked him up it didn’t seem to respond to his movements accurately.

The racing mechanic is as simple as you can get really, you turn your hands to go around corners (don’t cross your arms) and then when your boost bar is full you pull your arms towards your body and push them back out again to boost.

To fill your boost bar you need to perform tricks or drift, drifting is accomplished by sticking your ass out to one side while turning your arms the other way. Refer to embarrassing picture above…

Stunts are performed over jumps, while you are in the air you simply need to lean forwards or backwards, or spin around or drag your hands down left or right… which may be what they are really doing in that image above for a barrel roll.

After the demo was over I stuck around for a few minutes to try out stunt racing which is when you drive your car around a half pipe and pull of huge stunts while collecting apples and hitting bombs during your jumps… so maybe not entirely realistic after all.

All in all the game was enjoyable but nothing spectacular, I wouldn’t mind owning a copy but I severely doubt I would pay full price for it and with the Kinects ability to take pictures during the race I highly doubt I would ever play online.

The pictures are funny in-house but I prefer to remain as anonymous as possible and wouldn’t want my ugly mug plastered all over the internet more than Nick already has.

Notice our GEAR friend in the background was around a meter behind Nick and yet wasn’t interfering with the camera… mind you he is the one the camera struggled to pick up at the best of times.