It’s that time again, when we get the slightly remixed transcript of the latest episode submitted to Ciao. It’s the Kinect Sports text review and it includes some fresh remarks, such as the one you may find after the break:

It’s a little known, but well spread, disease in games journalism that launch titles get artificially inflated scores. This has inevitably happened with the Kinect‘s first crop of games, but it’s thankfully nowhere near as pronounced as say, the Xbox 360‘s. I’m not about to start analyzing this right now, I just want to point out and marvel at the fact that Perfect Dark Zero, one of the worst and most disappointing games of all time, currently has a Metacritic score of 81.

Fantastic.

We continue our analysis of Kinect launch titles and get on location to check the enjoyability, as well as the authenticity, of Rare’s Kinect Sports.

Featuring strikes, spikes & shocking swerves.

Just under 20 minutes, this review might seem needlessly lengthy, especially for a casual game, but there is a lot to be said about the Kinect, Rare and sports simulations in general. I hope we’ve managed to keep a refreshing pace throughout.

Taking a cue from Red Letter Media, I’ve also added background music pretty much everywhere and I think it worked out great. The narration sounds remarkably clean too, so, as far as the audio department is concerned, this just might be the best episode yet.

It is definitely the official season finalé, since we shot it in early December only to post-it mid-January, and I figure it kinda fits the erratic scheduling we had for season 1. Stay tuned for season 2, featuring a more traditional timetable, but starting with a more fourth dimensional episode!

Finding some time away from beach volleyball, swimming and sunbathing to return to my top nerdy activity, that of playing children’s games, I review the deliciously bizarre WarioWare: Smooth Moves for the Wii.

I was very impressed with the original WarioWare, for the Nintendo Game Boy; it had the clever idea of 5 second “microgames” and a quaint way to merge it with the story. Even though later installments dropped pretenses of story integration and focused solely on the wacky microgames, they still are pretty entertaining to play and make for a fun multiplayer experience on the Wii.

It was quickly apparent that the Wii was going to be a smash hit at parties and that minigame collections were going to be all the rage, so I take a look at the first third-party-developed one worth your time: Rayman Raving Rabbids.

Ubisoft is a publisher I’m really getting mixed feelings about. It has released some of my absolute favourite games, but it also frequently rushes its releases and exploits franchises to no end.

I really want to love the company behind the revival of Prince of Persia, but they almost ruined it with Warrior Within. Assassin’s Creed was a good concept that needed just a little extra polish to become an instant classic. And of course, they’ve pretty much milked everything Rayman-related dry, including the Rabbids series that could have remained something special, if only they weren’t so desperately trying to release them yearly.

We ease into Nintendo Wii coverage by reviewing what went on to be one of its simplest, yet top selling, games: Wii Play.

Actually a collection of minigames, Wii Play came bundled with a Wii Remote, so even if most of the gameplay was lackluster, it still presented a deal that was hard to argue with.

Wii Play, along with the rest of my Wii-centered reviews, were apparently good enough to garner the attention of some higher-ups that provided me with a ticket to semi-professional game-reviewing.