Start the Party

Highlights include Blown Away, where your job is to guide falling birds into their nests. You do this using a virtual electric fan, which is powered by pressing the trigger on the Move controller. Fail to catch the birds and they'll crash to their doom; allow the fan to get too close and they'll explode in a shower of feathers. On the Hard difficulty level this game requires a surprising amount of skill, so it's a good job Move is so responsive.

Picture This is also good fun. It involves using Move like a paintbrush to colour in shapes that appear on the screen. (Or, if you are pathetically childish, to paint big nobs.) At the end of the round, all the shapes you've painted are brought together to create a picture of something, such as a dancing monkey. (Or, if you are a secret genius, a dancing monkey made of big nobs.)

In Spooky Shootout, the screen is dark except for the spotlight thrown by your virtual torch. You must use it to light up ghosts so you can shoot them. When the big bad red ghost comes along, you have to hide the torch so he doesn't see you. It's like Alan Wake but with a more sophisticated narrative.

Spooky Shootout was a particular hit with Eurogamer's focus test group, which consisted of three four-year-old girls. They're right at the bottom end of the age range suitable for Start the Party (rated 3+ by PEGI) and they needed a bit of help with the menus and buttons. However, they insisted on playing Spooky Shootout again and again, and there was actual squealing.

The girls were also big fans of Bug Bash, perhaps because there's no button-pressing involved. You just swing your tennis racquet around to squash a load of insects, trying to avoid the bad bugs (or, if you are four, not giving a toss about the bad bugs because you're too busy squealing and treading Yoplait into the carpet).

Bug Bash isn't complex enough to keep adults entertained for very long, but it does at least contain the best joke in Start the Party. Each mini-game features commentary by an American gentleman who appears to have graduated from the Buzz Out of Buzz! Academy of Smuggery, with an A-Level in Tedious Wisecracks and a GNVQ in Shouting Clichés Because They're Sort of Relevant to What's Happening Even Though They're Not Really.

For example, during Blown Away the man yells things like, "Pride before a fall!" and "They really flocked to the nest!" When something explodes he says, "Chick-chick-chick... BOOM!"

At least that one sort of makes sense. What does "Being a chick is no fun" mean? Is the man making a socio-political comment on female oppression in a male-dominated world? Or is he just scratching around for another phrase, any phrase, which has the word "chick" in, having been banned from using "with a dick" by the crack team Sony set up following the LittleBigPlanet soundtrack fiasco and the thing about the church in Resistance?

Anyway, if you do well in Bug Bash, the man says, "You're a one-person swat team." That is the best joke in the game.

Moving on, Cut and Colour sees you using the Move controller like a pair of clippers to cut hair. It's fast-paced and pretty good fun. The same goes for Rooftop Rescue, where you pilot a remote-control helicopter by twisting the Move left and right. Your mission is to pick up people and deposit them safely on a helipad. It's too hard for younger kids but enjoyable enough for older ones.