Few were more excited than I when Sony announced at its pre-E3 2006 keynote address that the PlayStation 3 controller, the Sixaxis, would be motion-sensitive, or have "tilty support," as the cool kids call it.

Superior visuals and audio are expected from a new game console, and intelligent artificial intelligence, realistic physics and more simultaneous characters on screen are not immediately tangible. Motion-sensitive controls are an unexpected, major, immediately noticeable change to the way we play video games.

Motion controls on the PlayStation 3 came at the expense of vibration--that might change--but after years of using Nintendo's vibration-free WaveBird wireless GameCube controller and wireless PlayStation 2 controllers from Hori and Logitech with options to disable vibration to increase battery life, I discovered that I didn't miss vibration.

But in the 10 months since the release of the PlayStation 3, we have yet to see a good PS3 game that relies on motion-sensitive controls.

Tony Hawk's Project 8, available at the PlayStation 3's launch, could be played almost entirely with motion-based controls. It didn't work well, but we let it go because it was a launch game, and new concepts rarely work perfectly on the first try. Besides, the game could be played the old-fashioned way: by pressing buttons, triggers and thumbsticks.

Three months later came flOw. The required motion controls worked, and it was fun, but it was fun only for a few minutes. flOw was a tech demo, and like most tech demos, there was not enough to it to hold interest for a significant period of time.

Another three months later, we got Super Rub a Dub: another tech demo. The motion controls in this one were broken, somehow managing to be simultaneously too sensitive and too loose, making the game not fun, not even for a few minutes.

And now we have Lair: the first full-fledged game designed from the ground up to make use of the PlayStation 3's motion-sensitive controls.

You would think that almost a year after the release of the PlayStation 3 that game designers would have figured out how to properly make use of the Sixaxis' motion control ability, but no, Lair's required tilty controls are broken. Some disagree, and insist that Lair's motion controls work well, and a recent PlayStation 3 System Software update is rumored to have fixed them, but controls are not the only issue bringing Lair down, so fixed (or never broken) motion controls alone do not turn Lair from an awful game into a good one.

And that's just four games. Beyond those, motion-based controls in PlayStation 3 games have been token, and often out of place or awkward, if they exist at all.

The PlayStation 3 does not rely on its motion-sensitive abilities like the Wii, the other game console with a motion-sensitive controller, so it is not as big a disappointment when a PS3 game has token or no motion controls than it is when a Wii game has token or no motion controls, but motion controls are one of the things that differentiate the PS3 from the Xbox 360, its closest competitor, so not having a single good PlayStation 3 game that relies on or makes good use of motion-sensitivity makes this advantage moot, especially since the Xbox 360 Controller can vibrate and the Sixaxis cannot--again, this might change.

By now there should be multiple, full-fledged games (not tech demos) for the PlayStation 3 that rely on its controller's motion-sensing abilities, and countless others that make good use of it. That this is not the case almost a year after the PlayStation 3's launch should be an embarrassment to Sony Computer Entertainment.