For a Kinect game to be fun, it has to respond properly to your actions. If you are flailing your hands in the air and there is no response--or even a delayed one--then chances are you won't play for long. Poor control is just one of the problems with Ubisoft's MotionSports Adrenaline, a collection of six "extreme" sporting activities. Unfortunately, these promising activities are rendered almost unplayable by unresponsive controls, limited options, and noticeable glitches.

MotionSports Adrenaline offers six intense sporting events: rock climbing, kayaking, kite surfing, mountain biking, skiing, and wingsuit skydiving. Each sport has the same race objective where you complete a given course in as little time as possible while collecting coin pieces that are scattered throughout the course. Though racing fast and collecting points are important, performing stunts and avoiding obstacles that come your way also contribute to your score.

The first problem with the game is that there is no easy way to learn how to perform the given actions for each sport. Outside of the basic visual aids that appear in the loading screen, there is no tutorial to show you the right or wrong way of approaching each action. In general, the controls are pretty basic: Shifting/tilting your body left or right will move your character on the screen in that direction, but sports that have you holding onto an object do not respond to your actions in a timely manner. In both mountain biking and kite surfing, you hold onto an object--the handles of either a kite or a bike--but to turn the handles, you have to shift your hands either left or right. In almost every race with these two particular sports, the motions required for turning left and right often register only intermittently or after a noticeable delay. On courses where a number of obstacles are in your way, the likelihood of hitting one is greater because the sensor won't recognize the actions in a timely manner.

To help you earn points to better your score, certain onscreen stunt markers appear. These typically direct you to throw your arms or legs in a particular direction and mimic the image on the screen. In most races, there is a noticeable delay, and any gesture that requires you to have one arm hover over your torso is almost never acknowledged. Rock climbing suffers from the weakest recognition, though. The objective here is simple: Climb to the top of a cliff while avoiding the various obstacles that come your way. The problem is that most motions require you to lift your arms above your head, pretend to grab something, and then bring your arms down to your chest. When done properly, your character should move up to the next available section of the mountain, but in most cases, the Kinect doesn't pick up the gesture, which just leads to further frustration.

Missing a trick on the Mountain Bike course.

There are three modes available. Quick Play lets you play either alone or with someone else. The more you play of a particular activity, the more courses and boosts for the game's cast of characters become available. Each sport has only two or three courses available, so it won't take long to unlock them all. If you are connected to Xbox Live, race challenges pop up periodically. In some cases, you need to reach a checkpoint in a certain amount of time or collect enough coins before reaching a checkpoint.

While it's nice to have these challenges, there is no clear indication as to when they start or finish; they just randomly appear. As you race, a notification will pop up saying that there is a challenge that you need to beat. At the same time, you issue challenges to other players, but you won't have any idea of what you have specifically issued. This leaves you guessing as to what some other player will have to accomplish.

While a second person can play with or against you in all races, having a number of friends around allows you to participate in the game's multiplayer mode. In Adrenaline Party, you and up to three friends play in 10 randomly chosen activities with the person or team with the highest score after 10 events being declared the winner. The mode itself is nice because it randomly selects the games that the groups take part in, but without a proper tutorial, those who play for the first time may not have much fun alongside those who are already accustomed to dealing with the irksome controls.

The final available mode is called You Against the World and has you competing against other online players. Unlike the challenges that pop up while racing in Quick Play mode, these offer event-specific requirements where you try to rack up a better score than other players. These challenges might have you finishing a course within a certain amount of time or collecting a specific number of coins, and they can only be unlocked by logging into Ubisoft's Uplay service and redeeming Ubipoints. It's an unnecessary obstacle that clearly exists only to ensure that you create a Uplay account if you don't have one already. It might also force you to quit out of the game entirely; upon leaving Uplay, you're greeted by a "Please stand in front of the sensor" message that obscures part of your screen and can only be removed by going back to the dashboard.

MotionSports Adrenaline is a mess. With so few extreme sports games currently on the market, this could have been a great opportunity for Ubisoft to lure in an audience eager to experience the exhilaration of skydiving from an airplane or climbing a mountain. Instead, this is a game that most people will begin to play, get frustrated with, and quickly turn off. Even after learning to cope with the game's shortcomings--of which there are many--trying to lure others to play along with you will be quite the challenge.

BurgerTime never gets its just desserts. This '80s arcade classic from Data East was a big hit back in the glory days of the quarter gobbler, but the game never seems to hit many top 10 lists and has been all but ignored in the rush to port everything from Pac-Man to Time Pilot to contemporary consoles. But burger-tromping (and likely health department-violating) chef Peter Pepper finally makes his return in BurgerTime: World Tour as an Xbox Live Arcade effort from developer MonkeyPaw Games. Unfortunately, once you get past the nostalgia evoked by battling sinister foodstuffs and listening to the memorable musical score from 1982, the game turns into a frustrating muddle.

Peter Pepper is now pretty handy with a spatula.

At first, however, this new BurgerTime comes off a bit like the old BurgerTime. You take on the role of mustachioed chef Peter Pepper (or your Xbox avatar) in a surreal world. Burgers are put together by running around floating scaffolding and stomping on patties, cheese, tomatoes, buns, and other fixings that were probably damn delicious before Pete got his size-10 loafers all over them. Every time you run across one of these items, it falls a floor down and is one step closer to its final destination on a big plate at the bottom of the level. Of course, making burgers in this rather athletic fashion isn't as easy as it sounds. Enemy foods like eggs, hot dogs, and pickles aren't too happy about Peter's love of red meat, so you have to dodge them, crush them by dropping ingredients on them, or send them on a ride down when you run over the burger fixing of your choice. With one touch from baddies, you die, so it's fortunate that you can stun them with the blasts of pepper that were your one weapon back in 1982. Or you can take advantage of new features like the ability to jump and employ power-ups that include a whirlwind spatula attack and rockets that boost you to upper levels without the use of ladders.

The above recipe could have made for a welcome BurgerTime update, but developer MonkeyPaw Games pushed things a little too far and turned the game into a complete reenvisioning of the original. The biggest issue here is 3D level design and an odd camera perspective. Instead of playing against a flat Donkey Kong-style arrangement of ladders and girders as in the original game, you express your love of artery-clogging treats in kind of a theater-in-the-round setting where the camera revolves around the whole map. This concept is totally unnecessary and confusing, so much so that the developers had to add an arrow pointing you to the next burger to be stomped. Even with this navigational tool, the circular perspective and busy level design lead to a lot of frustration. You get lost a lot and inevitably run straight into unseen enemies coming around the curvature of the maps. Giant scowling hot dogs just shouldn't be able to sneak up on you as they do.

Controls and collision detection are also off. Peter slides around on burger patties and tomatoes like a sports car on black ice, and he can even careen off of plain-old platforms. Because the game requires a lot of precisely timed jumps around collapsing and flipping floors, the lack of fine control leads to many untimely deaths. Even when you don't die, it's too easy to miss jumping targets and wind up falling down to the start of levels like you were on a bad streak in a game of Snakes and Ladders.

The best way to lose weight with burgers? Run around while making them.

For what it's worth, there is a lot of content here. There are dozens of levels in the game spread out among campaigns set on the city streets of New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico. Everything looks pretty good, too, although the cartoony attractiveness of the settings is offset by all of the detail. The backgrounds are as cluttered up as an episode of Hoarders. So it's easy to lose sight of enemies and even run into a corner with a pack of hot dogs in hot pursuit because you didn't notice a wall. Sound effects are updated with a nod to the old game, with a remastered version of the original score that's pretty catchy, along with cute additions like growling eggs. The challenge factor is high right from the beginning, with lots of fast-paced levels strewn with enemies, condiment-blasting cannons, giant impaling screws, loads of soaring platforms, and huge burgers you can stack. So you'll likely need a good six or seven hours to plow through the entire single-player experience, which is pretty good value for an 800-point ($10) XBLA game. Split-screen and online multiplayer let you duke it out with rival chefs in timed burger battles, but neither is very playable. It's difficult to get into a quick match because almost nobody is playing, and split-screen local play scrunches the maps so much that it's hard to see what's happening.

Stick with the original. BurgerTime: World Tour has its heart in the right place and evokes fond memories of a nearly 30-year-old classic arcade game, but the 3D perspective, control problems, and too many ill-advised additions to the basic formula make this one hard burger to get down.

Sonic and his furry posse haven't had the best run in recent years, but the ailing hedgehog finally returns in good form for his latest outing. Sifting out most of the cruddy elements from recent games that soured longtime fans and pushed some folks away for good, the development team hits a real sweet spot with Sonic Generations. Blending the tried-and-true classic 2D Sonic gameplay of the '90s with a refined, tighter version of Sonic's recent 3D jaunts yields a nostalgia-laden experience that favors blazing speed over schlocky gimmicks. When you add high replay value and a heap of extra goodies to that winning formula, you get one of the better Sonic games in recent memory.

Generations stars not one but two different versions of Sonic that coexist simultaneously in the same realm as a result of the game's time-bending plot setup. An upbeat picnic party gets ruined when a dark, powerful menace sucks up all of Sonic's pals and scatters them through time and space. Left stuck in a void, modern Sonic meets up with his retro self from the 16-bit era, and the two team up to recover their buddies and set things right. The story is laced with pleasantly light humor and serves as the vehicle for bringing the old and new eras together. Saving your friends trapped in time on the hub world requires you to warp back to memorably reimagined stages culled from past Sonic games. You have to tackle every level twice--once with the old-school Sonic and once with the modern Sonic--and that might sound like a cheap way of extending the adventure, but each hero's run offers a very different experience.

Playing as the original Sonic has you zipping through the undulating side-scrolling stages to collect gold rings, stomp foes, and navigate tricky platforming sections in 2D in a similar manner to the old-school games. Armed with just the spin dash and a need for speed, old Sonic brings back a great classic vibe. Returning for Act Two as the newer Sonic delivers a behind-the-shoulder, forward-moving 3D perspective that sometimes shifts to 2D for intermittent stretches. They're faster-paced runs that cover familiar terrain without being copy-and-paste repeats of the same stage designs. Modern Sonic has alternate moves like midair homing attacks and a speed boost instead of the typical spin dash. Both hedgehogs have somewhat unique moves, and each handles a little differently. The controls can feel a tad clunky when shifting between the old and new characters, and it's easy to lose track of what set of abilities you're working with during the common 2D stretches in each act. That's something that you get used to with time, though. There might be moments when you jolt to a dead stop or struggle through some of the platforming sections, but the challenge isn't so steep that you can't overcome the game's tougher areas with a little practice.

Sonic's surroundings have never looked better.

While the punchy, speed-driven gameplay keeps Generations upbeat and flowing, it's the impressive level designs that really seal the deal. Outside of the hub world, all of the main areas you explore are updated re-creations of stages pulled from a handful of past Sonic games. Multiple paths are the order of the day here, and obstacles like moving platforms, springboards, spikes, water areas, foes, lasers, and tons of other varied challenges are sprinkled generously throughout each branching route. Levels are also a real visual treat. Regardless of whether you're playing as old or new Sonic, the bustling background scenery shifts and pulses with life beyond the chaos erupting in the foreground. There's a ton of detail crammed into every area, and though much of it speeds by at a breakneck pace, it's gorgeous when you spare a second to notice. More deliberate transitional sections where Sonic gets chased by a rampaging truck armed with whirling buzz saws, hops across the noses of leaping killer whales, or rides a missile skyward really add some stellar flourishes too. Though few in number, the epic boss encounters showcase a similar pizzazz.

The collection and speed-run-focused vibe in Generations naturally encourages replay, but there are also a lot of minigames and content to unlock. Some are integral to progressing deeper into the game as well. After completing the main acts in each section of the hub world, you have to collect three keys to unlock the door to the next boss encounter. Gaining access to the key requires completing a series of minigames, such as racing duels, rival battles, and score challenges. Some are more enjoyable than others, but you can pick and choose which ones you want to play to unlock the key. With the main stages, the optional minigames, and the desire to go back to get a perfect score, there's enough content to chew on for a long time if you feel so inclined.

Switching from 2D to 3D offers a nice change.

Mixing the best elements from old and new Sonic games together into a seamless experience works out amazingly well. It's clear the Sonic team went above and beyond this time around to spit shine this game into a thing of beauty. It may have missed a few warts here and there, but Sonic Generations doesn't skimp on the speed or the fun.