Kinect's Second Wave

Frontier looks to be handing in some top quality work too, with Kinect Disneyland Adventures. Now, pretend for a second that you really, really like Disneyland (professional disclosure: I'm not even pretending), and then try to imagine how excited you'd be if someone squashed the whole thing down onto a disk.

That's what the house of Elite has done. It's recreated the real Disneyland - the Anaheim, California one - as a fully explorable open world, and set within it a series of stages based around the famous rides. At the moment, the team's only showing off Peter Pan's Flight and Big Thunder Mountain: both seem to involve swooping around beautiful dioramas collecting stuff.

Multiple paths are promised, and the eye candy is excellent, with Peter Pan's London being particularly pretty: a wonderful midnight blue world of chimney pots and roof tiles. The navigation isn't bad either - these are reinventions of the rides as the Imagineers wished they could have built them, apparently, so you'll fly through Neverland with your arms outstretched, leaning to turn and flapping to get a speed boost, instead of hopping into a mechanical galleon which I've always suspected could have your arm off.

Disneyland itself is far more than just a hub. You'll be able to explore every element of the park, using a neat movement system that sees you pointing at the screen to shuffle around, and your kids can interact with famous Disney characters, many of whom will send them on quests. When that's done, there are always plenty of bonus objects to hunt for and mess around with, and when that's done, remember that it's still Disneyland in your freaking living room. If there isn't a level based on the Haunted Mansion, mind you, I will go absolutely mental.

Beyond all that, Microsoft is also releasing its fair share of straight-up sequels. Kinect Sports 2 is on the way, and although the good stuff is currently embargoed, I can say that the blank looks very blank.

Elsewhere, Harmonix has added drop-in, drop-out multiplayer to Dance Central 2. Each player will be able to select their own difficulty level, practice mode will allow you to work on specific parts of songs, and you'll be free to import all your tracks from the original game. Otherwise, it looks a lot like business as usual, which means that it's still a party game you're going to struggle to play at parties, because newcomers won't have a clue what they're doing.

That's the start of Kinect's second wave of games, then: Microsoft's many-fronts assault on this year's Christmas market. As attacks go, the Xbox has certainly built up a bit of momentum, and now it remains... No. The second bit of that analogy just wasn't going to work.