Microsoft's Kinect feels like magic when everything is working well, and it's exciting to think about the kind of game experiences it'll provide in the coming years. Last night, I started playing Deca Sports Freedom with nothing but hope, but it made me realize that we're also going to see a number of broken, quickie cash-in products as well. This game is painful to play, and there's almost nothing to say in its favor.

The menus, for instance, are nearly impossible to navigate. The game tracks both your right and left hand, and my right-hand cursor just seemed jittery; when I scratched my leg, the game went absolutely insane. The cursor began to jump randomly around the screen, and I very quickly realized that I could only get anywhere by standing stock still and only moving my right hand and arm. This is not a comfortable experience, especially when the rest of the games I've played on the hardware do such a good job of filtering non-essential noise from the interactions.

I tried archery, which is one of my favorite virtual sports. The tutorial was meaningless, and you're given no feedback about how you are moving during practice. I brought both hands up and pantomimed the action of drawing an arrow, but no matter how I moved my arms and body, I couldn't get the crosshair to move with me. Then it stopped moving vertically, so all my arrows were shot directly into the ground. You fire by making an upward, jerking movement with your right hand, and it worked about thirty percent of the time.

Next up was Paintball. You're supposed to move your character by moving a leg forward or backward, and then leaning left and right and pointing with your right hand to aim your gun. The game explained all this in the tutorial, but when it gave me control, my character began sprinting forward and to the left. I was standing perfectly still. To fire, you again jerk your right hand upwards, and I was able to get this to work about 60 percent of the time. We're getting better!

These games are supposed to be intuitive, turning your body into your means of interaction. I tried multiple times to get the games in Deca Sports Freedom to work the way they were supposed to, but I've since given up. It doesn't work, and that should have been clear to anyone testing the game; it's monstrous that this game was released with a $40 price tag.

The Kinect can do some amazing things, and there is no excuse for half-assed titles like this. In fact, if someone played this as their first Kinect game, they would think the hardware itself doesn't work; games this bad with this sort of peripheral can very quickly damage the brand.

Games like this make me angry; they seem to exist only to show contempt for your time and money.