Perhaps one of my favorite things about the current console generation is the amount of demos you can download. Why buy when you can try before dropping $60 on a new game?

(Pulls up pants by belt ala Old Man) Back in the day, you had to go to to stores to try out games and that's only if you were lucky enough to have the hottest game in the demo stand.

Unfourtunately for gamers today, trying out new hardware isn't as easy -- and that's where Kinect comes in.

Microsoft's revolutionary camera, which promises and delivers on controller-less gameplay, launched today and while the technology looks and sounds great, there's an unknown about it all that makes it hard to buy it day one.

That's where Best Buy comes in; the electronics retailer has Kinect demo units set up in their stores for those of us who like to try and buy.

I stopped in today and had the chance to mess around in Kinect Adventures, the pack-in game that comes with the Kinect camera.

I only got to play a game-mode called speedball or fastball (sounds like a bar shooter, but it plays like a classic game of Breakout!), but it was enough to give me an early impression of Kinect.

It's for real.

For real in the sense Microsoft delivered on their promise of fluid, controller-less gameplay.

The Kinect camera caught my 6-foot-6 body frame well and controlling the menus with my hands, though it may need some fine-tuning, worked well.

It's acutally quite creepy. When I walked in front of the camera it said Kinect would find the best angle to view me at. The black tri-pod started moving almost to the point where the camera was staring me in the eye, watching, recording, perhaps transmitting my race, sex, age and clothing to Microsoft. OK, it's not SkyNet, but good lord did I feel ackward facing off with the camera...

Now on to the game.

The Breakout!-variant game showed off some serious potential, but ultimately is a bit limited. You smack the ball like you're serving a volleyball and then use your limbs to bounce it back at targets. If you hit some bonus targets, anywhere between two-to-three balls fly back at you while you scramble to hit them all. Miss the ball and you're given a new ball to whack.

After completing the challenges the Kinect camera shows off some goofy pictures of you playing the game (I'm sure the people at Best Buy will love looking at those on the 360's hard drive) and you can win an animated trophy.

It's fun, but I can only wonder for how long?

I ended up drawing a bit of a crowd at Best Buy. I guess a lanky person waving his arms and legs around in public does that sort of thing, but people were more impressed with the controller-less play than my idiot antics. Kinect has that weird, side-show appeal and that's going to make it sell more than anything else. The crowd watching me play Speedball, or whatever it's called, easily displays that.

When I finished up I kind of left wanting a Kinect, but reminded myself that this might not be the best day one hardware purchse of all time. After all, my biggest worry is that Kinect is a $150 mini-game machine. Had I gotten to try out Kinect JoyRide or the sports game perhaps I'd be setting up a Kinect right now, but $150 for what might just be human body waggle doesn't seem justified.

We really won't have an idea of what else can be done with the technology until a third party comes out with something truly innovative for the core-gamer.

Whether you think Kinect is the end of gaming or the beginning of a grand new era, remember that without steps forward, gaming can't survive. It will take some time to see if Kinect is the leap in gaming technology that Microsoft promises, but my initial reaction is with the right development, it certaintly could be.

Carved by my fiancee.

Fable and I have a bit of history together.

During my first college spring break I came down with an illness that left me sick in my parents' basement rather than partying with sexy co-eds.

So while my friends went off to Virginia Beach and re-discovered that the Atlantic Ocean stays cold in March (if you're in Virginia), I picked up a copy of Fable for my Xbox. A lost spring break suddenly turned into a week where I enjoyed torturing people, killing at will and boasting about my accomplishments to digital people who cowered in fear.

Fable wasn't perfect, but it was fun and I appreciated it's delightful twist on the action-RPG.

So when Fable II came out I was very disappointed. It was decidedly easier, focused less on the story, was limited in various ways (armor, weapons, etc.) and Peter Molyneaux promised I'd enjoy farting more than questing.

Yeah...right.

Fable II left me nervous about Fable III, but when it comes to Fable I always think back to that Spring in 2004 where the game captivated me. So I went ahead and purchased it.

Well, enough about me, here's some early thoughts about an hour or so in.

* Dying is still punished with only an experience loss, which I hated in Fable II and I'm sure to dislike this time around.

* The menus are easier to navigate because it's all just one big house now. I actually like it. It keeps your items streamlined, easier to find stuff you found question and it's enjoyable to look at.

* The dog is still awesome, but I haven't done much with him

* Story is much better than Fable II. I'm actually interested in saving the kingdom, but I'm scared the game stops with saving the kingdom. So far Fable I has the best story of them all, so we'll see if III's can match up. I'm not hopeful.

* Combat is still a tad bit easy. Doesn't seem like there's mana either for magic, so you can just blast away spells. Very disappointed in this, but perhaps I'm wrong.

* The game has an absolutely enjoyable personality. John Cleese plays the butler and it's a joy to hear him talk. Characters carry one funny conversations and the world feels alive. Peter Molyneaux always makes outlandish promises, but he's delivered in making Albion a breathing fantasy world worth exploring. Hard not to laugh when a bandit screams "Kill the Tom impersonator!"

* Co-op is fun, but for some reason it seems that whoever is host only gains progression through the story. Your partner will have to do it all on his own time. Maybe it's a glitch, but if it's true, that's a serious knock on the game. Why bother co-oping if you can't progress together?

* Love the new world map and how you can look at individual buildings/quests and see what you've missed in different areas (i.e. keys, gnomes, quests). A vast improvement from Fable II.

* The game simplified the actions you can do with people. Instead of a silly mini-game that makes you taunt better, you can just do it. It's just better this way and isn't a distraction.

* Lots of side quests to do. I thought Fable II was short on side quests, but Fable III seems chock-full of them and there's a variety. In Fable II it was hard to really get lost in side quests, but Fable III looks as if they've corrected that.

* Leveling up is simpler and it no longer requires spending a certain type of orb. It's actually a bit nicer not having to use magic just to grind magic orbs up to a new spell. Lets you play how you want when you want without going "oh man, I should have had this spell, but now I don't." It might be a tad bit easier, but it's for the better.

That's about what I can think of right now. I'll probably post a review in the upcoming or following System Wars Monthly, but for now I have to say I'm enjoying it. If you're a Fable fan, there's a lot to be excited about.

From the design team of Vanquish:

"The PS3 is kind of like a sports car that's very high-performance and specific in its usage, whereas the 360 is more like a car that everybody's driving. It doesn't have the same range as a sports car, but it has more versatility," producer Atsushi Inaba told VG247 during E3.

Ouch.

Anyway, going to pick up Vanquish today, but can't decide if I should get it for the Xbox 360 or the PS3. The quote above definately does have me tilted one way, just a bit...

You really do have to applaud Zipper Interactive and thier support of Massive Action Game, better known as MAG.

Despite it's horribly generic title, Zipper has managed to create what I feel is one of the most progressive first person shooters of this generation. How many FPS games can you say that about?

What did Killzone 2 do to change FPS other than just up the graphics ante? Modern Warfare 2 taught us all how to throw rage-fits in a new, violent way. Crysis, while beautiful, comes across as just another FPS with zany abilities and a meh story.

In many ways, the FPS genre just hasn't moved forward much this generation.

What more can you really do with a first person view point and a gun?

Perhaps MAG's charm is in the fact that it doesn't try to change the core values of the FPS, but instead takes the part everyone loves the most -- the multiplayer -- and creates what we've all wanted to experience on our couches since the first "modern era weapons" FPS game came out.

War. Safe war. You know, war where you can't really die, but you want to "experience" what is really going on "over there". (Note: yes, MAG is far from "what's going on over there" but you get the point.)

Fighting on a battlefield with 256 people is an absolute blast. Zipper found way to make it work, make it run smoothly, and best of all, keep it intimate. You'll see the same competitors over and over again, but the scale of size means that you'll see them in very different situations.

Think about how in MW2 you might get camped and know you can just get an easy kill in a camp spot. MAG remedies that with it's massive map. You COULD camp, but it's not going to last long, and when you do run into an old foe again, it's likely to mean something; perhaps it to save a checkpoint or defend an APC.

It's a simple idea. Make the battlefield bigger and with more people and some PC FPS games have tried, but MAG brings it to the consoles and executes it.

The game also brings the maps to life with the havoc you've wrecked smoldering around you. When a match starts a somewhat calm oil refinery turns into a fiery, smoking inferno where you might get killed standing around to admire the destruction the game has caused.

And there's more on the way.

Zipper hasn't shown signs of abandoning the game and even introduced controls for the Playstation Move.

MAG isn't revolutionary in that it's introduced new gameplay elements, but more so in that it's changed the way we should see next-generation multiplayer.

Somehow, eight versus eight doesn't feel much like "war" anymore when you've experienced the war-torn battlefields of MAG.

It's far from perfect, but if you fancy shooting games or experiencing ground-breaking ideas, MAG's still kicking butt even nine months after its release.