Yeti Sports Arctic Adventures

Featuring the Yeti Sports characters, this title is aimed squarely at children and partygoers. On the packaging it boasts "spectacular realistic 3D graphics that will literally take your breath away", and "stunning visual effects". But in fact the images consist of cartoonish 3D that's colourful, bold and simple. The graphics do the job, but they're nothing special.

Not that graphics are the main consideration with activity games. However, another bad sign that this game won't live up to its promises is that there are only six games, none of which have a great deal of depth to them. In Free Flight you guide an albatross in a race against time. Pingu Flight is similar, except this time you carry a Pingu and drop it onto a target.

Snowboarding, Half Pipe Racing and Baseball are all short games that mostly involve racing around and lobbing Pingus. Possibly the most satisfying of all the games is Pingu Tennis, which is played with Pingus instead of balls and is something of a cross between tennis and dodgeball.

On the whole it's a disappointing selection, not least because the games are quite hard, even on easy levels, due to their poor gameplay. I have nothing against hard games, when they are fair. But in Yeti Sports Arctic Adventures a lot of the games will exit early after only a very few wrong moves. This is especially frustrating when the EyeToy controller isn't renowned for its accuracy. The games don't compensate for this inherent inaccuracy and the problems of background noise that you usually get with the EyeToy.

The poor motion detection isn't entirely the fault of the controller: other games fare much better with this peripheral because they compensate for the controller's weaknesses. But in Yeti Sports Arctic Adventures five of the six games require too much precision.

Some of the controls will be hard for younger players to grasp at first, and those players who don't read quickly will need to keep checking the booklet. The movements are different for each mini-game, and not always intuitive. There are three multiplayer modes, although unfortunately playing in this mode doesn't prevent players from getting booted from games when they make mistakes.

The exertion level is moderate for most games, but when a lot of these can be very brief it hardly counts as a workout. There is no warm-up sequence. The amount of exercise to be had depends on a player's skill, with better players getting to exercise for longer. However, the game is simply too annoying to encourage people to want to complete it. Quite apart from the drive-you-crazy soundtrack, the frustrating motion detection means that this is game isn't nearly as much fun as it should be.

Active Games

Sports and Fitness

Musical

Retro