I spent a bit of time playing TotemBall on the Xbox 360 with a Vision Camera over the weekend.

The game is available for trial on Microsoft's Partnernet, the alternative reality Xbox Live for game reviewers. Because this was on a preview site, please keep in mind that I'm not sure if this is the final build or they are still doing some work on it.

While the game is quite cute, I found it a bit hard to control and, at times, more frustrating than fun.

I won't even try to get into the muddled back-story for the game, just know that it involves you tooling around with a rickety looking cart collecting gems and missing totem pieces.

The totem pieces are large discs-shaped carvings that feature the arms of a person playing some musical instrument. When you pick one up, the piece appears on top of the turtle and, after a few seconds, starts to jam. The more of these pieces you pick up the better and more intricate the music.

In the first level, I only found one totem, but by the second I was up to collecting five or so, which included a bass player, a drummer and what looks like a synth keyboard.

The game almost plays a bit like a 3D version of Marble Madness, except instead of taking place in a maze, all of the action occurs outside on islands and such.

The key difference, of course, is that you control this game with the Vision Camera and arm movements.

To move your Totem around you need to hold your arms out to your sides so that your hands can been seen in waterfalls that fill the edge of both sides of the screen.

To move forward you raise both of your hands, to move back you lower both arms, to stand still you keep your arms out even, like you're forming the letter "t". And to turn you move one arm up and the other down.

There are a couple of problems with this form of control. First, the game seemed to keep losing track of my arms. So when I would try to go forward, I would turn or sometimes I would get stuck going forward or backwards.

I tried playing with and without my game room's overhead lights on and also tried playing with my palms out, but nothing seemed to help this. Moving a little bit forward helped a touch, but I think essentially the controls are just very finicky.

The other issue is that your arms get damn tired holding them out to your sides or moving them up and down. Controlling a game for like a minute or two is fine, but it gets downright painful after ten minutes or so and soon you have to just pause the game.

The developers tried to compensate for this by placing special pieces in the game that look like little beds and let your rest for 10 seconds, but I found them to be spread apart too infrequently and the break not to be quite long enough.

If you can master the controls and have arms of steel, the game itself is sorta fun. I played a lot with the various offerings that Sony has for the Eye Toy, but aside from AntiGrav, I always thought the games were very empty things meant to really just show off the camera.

It's obvious that Totemball's developers put some thought into level design, making it a light puzzle, platformer and adding enough funkiness to be fun... if you can tolerate the pain.

For a freebie, Totemball is worth the time, though I don't think it will convince anyone, on it's own, to run out and buy the camera. Brian Crecente

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