Sports Champions (Sony)

Table Tennis meanwhile is a much better demonstration of the controller's precision, with the disembodied paddle perfectly matching your motion 1:1. In fact, the extent to which it maps your movement is initially quite surprising and it's a giant leap forward from the stand and hit simplicity of Wii Sports' Table Tennis.

Playing works remarkably like actual table tennis, and rather than standing still and waving your arms around like you're performing gobbledegook semaphore, you'll find yourself having to actually stretch, shuffle around a bit and reach for that little white ball. We'd even go so far to say that it's almost as good as playing a game of real table tennis (almost), albeit restricted to the confines of your television screen. You can even put spin on the ball, pull off slices, smashes and back hands. It's rather impressive and a real indication as to the potential of Sony's motion technology.

The Fight: Lights Out (Sony)

The Fight: Lights Out is another first-party Move IP that's been outsourced to Sony's Xdev Studio Europe, and its concept is possibly the simplest for PlayStation Move. Throwing punches is a real no-brainer, but building an entire standalone retail release around it? That's another story. The Fight is down and dirty with its drab monochrome palette, dappled with an occasional spurt of claret, but it runs the risk of being a one-trick pony.

Requiring two Move controllers to play, The Fight is the most expensive single-player title as it requires the most investment and for what is essentially a game that involves jabs, uppercuts, headbutts, headlocks and little else; it seems like a stretch to ask punters to stump up the cash. Still, what The Fight does do well is make it easy to calibrate your arm movement and track your head to make it feel like you're bobbing and weaving and actually engaging in a proper scrap.

It's not really a calorie burner however, and despite working up a modest sweat, the end of each session rewarded our intense punching with a paltry 6 kcal loss. It is compulsive though, and it's incredibly easy to set up, requiring you to simply stretch your arms out at your side with both controllers and press both Move branded face buttons simultaneously, and then put them beneath your chin (balls up... steady on) and do the same. Bam! You're ready to go. The PS Eye then tracks your head, so that you can sway from side to side and lay into your opponent. Pulling the triggers enables you to drop a headbutt with a forward thrust, or grab your on-screen rival in a headlock and do some damage with a brutal elbow or a gut punch.

It's something that will likely be great fun and an enjoyable novelty for a couple of hours, but there needs to be more to it than what we've played so far. A versus mode would be incredibly welcome for starters, although who but the richest of PS3 owners is realistically going to shell out for four controllers? Very few we imagine. Still, this is early alpha code, so there's every chance that the developer can inject some much-needed depth into the proceedings and add a little extra refinement to The Fight's control mechanics and breezeblock-to-the-face subtlety before it launches alongside the PlayStation Move in September.

Kung Fu Rider (Japan Studio)

Going from the bleak, filth-encrusted derelict warehouse venue of The Fight to the day-glo streets of Japan for Kung Fu Rider, where you control a Japanese businessman rolling down a hill on an office chair, is a hell of a transition to make. Yes, you read that right. Except in our demo, rather than an office chair, we've got a pink pony with wheels. And yes, you read that bit right too.

Initially, Kung Fu Rider is a real pain to control, and you'll find yourself contorting your wrist wildly trying to make the runaway chair adhere to its path. Holding the controller vertically, the idea is to tip it towards yourself to accelerate and jerk forward to jump. Holding the trigger makes the white-collar exec, Tobio, lean back to duck under obstacles – of which there are plenty – and you can speed over ramps and perform silly spins and other stunts. The face buttons then allow you to kick off the floor and nudge yourself back on track or pull off crazy roundhouse kicks to take out the gangsters intent on killing you for reasons we can't quite fathom.

But then the same can be said for the whole of Kung Fu Rider. It's completely and utterly nuts, littering its downhill races with numerous colourful tokens to collect, which presumably give you bonus points and multipliers. We couldn't decipher what their exact purpose was though with all of the zany action and colourful mania being relentlessly hurled at us. Imagine Crazy Taxi's fast-paced madness multiplied by 100 and viewed from a speeding chair, and you're about halfway there. All in all, it's not exactly the ideal showcase for Move, but colour us slightly intrigued by Kung Fu Rider's unreserved insanity.

As we've already said, our first experience with PlayStation Move was a mixed bag, but it's a fairly encouraging mixed bag nonetheless. Kung Fu Rider is an interesting curio that could enjoy a cult following amongst those able to master its controls. The Fight: Lights Out works, but needs more direction and depth, beyond simply punching seven bells out of an ugly bloke. And Sports Champions is the sort of thing you'd normally expect for a motion-controller, but we were pleasantly surprised by how well the Table Tennis mini-game tracked our movement. One thing is abundantly clear: the PlayStation Move when implemented correctly, works incredibly well. It really does perform proper 1:1 movement tracking, which could potentially add fresh life to shooters, sports games and perhaps much, much more.

PlayStation Move is due out in September 2010.