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Genre: Action (literally)

Format: CD

Developer: Strange Flavour

Publisher: Freeverse Software

Minimum System Requirements: 400MHz G3/G4 (certain effects required a G5), Mac OS X v10.1.5, 256MB RAM, 200MB hard drive space, iSight or any FireWire video camera

Review Computer: 2.5GHz Dual Processor G5, 1GB RAM, Mac OS X v10.4.1, ATI RADEON 9800 Pro graphics acceleration

Network Feature: Rendezvous (Flysight only)

Price: $34.95 ($9.95 upgrade from Toysight)

ESRB Rating: N/A

Availability: Now

Official Website: www.toysight.com

When Freeverse first showed me Toysight at Macworld Expo San Francisco 2004, I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen on the Macintosh. When I brought it home and showed it to my wife, she said, "It's creepy and I hate it." Of course, she says that about a lot of things I like: sword fighting skeleton movies, sushi, Yes...

You may agree with her on those three examples, but what's so creepy about Toysight, you ask? Well, it's a game that uses your iSight camera or any firewire equipped digital camcorder to put you in the game. Rather than control the characters and objects with a mouse, keyboard or game pad (can anyone definitively settle for me whether "game pad" should be written as one or two words?), you do so by waving your hands in the air. The camera captures this motion and puts it on screen. In one of the new games in Toysight Gold, in fact, the object is to inflate your opponent's head until it explodes. I guess that is kind of creepy, but you probably won't be surprised at how fun it is.

What happens is that you see your image on the screen, inside the game. You can see where your hands are and move them accordingly. It's all a bit ghostly, really, like you're some kind of god looking down on and controlling your subjects. This is especially weird in Free Fall, the parachuting game, where it's almost angelic; here's this little guy plummeting to Earth at 120MPH, trying to line up with other parachuters and catch some balloons, but there's this oddly transparent, omnipresent figure (you) controlling his every move, guiding him to safety. I'd like to think that the one time I went parachuting, there was a higher power controlling my moves, too. Well, actually, there was in the form of that guy who was strapped to my back and did all of the work. All I did was fall.

Anyway, let's talk set-up. After installing the software from the CD, you simply need to have your iSight or firewire camera plugged into your computer and turned on for everything to work. Toysight finds the camera when launching, then goes through a brief calibration period. It first scans in the room to get a good picture of it, then asks you to step in front of the camera. A tutorial explains how to use the interface, and you're ready to go. Bear in mind that everything in this game is controlled with body motions, including the set-up and navigation screens. Your buttons appear at the top of the monitor, and you simply point at them to select them. This was a bit confusing at first, as you have to position a button in the center of the screen before you're able to actually select it, but that ends up being no big deal. It's also somewhat annoying in that people walking around behind you can make selection just by bumping their head into the menu option.

There are twelve games and a few toys in Toysight Gold, and we'll focus on the games. They are as follows:

• Submarine Battle
• The Plank
• Marble Factory
• Free Fall
• Volcano God
• The Owl and the Pussycat
• Toy Wars
• Pie Sight
• Tennis Xtreme
• Flysight (Gold version only)
• Mars Lander (Gold version only)
• AirHeads (Gold version only)

Some of these are more fun than others, but all make decent use of the technology. As I played through them, two thoughts occurred to me:

The first was a question of whether these would be fun without the object and motion detection technology. In most cases, probably not. The Owl and the Pussycat would stand well on its own, and perhaps Tennis Xtreme (complete with the oh-so-clever misspelling), but some of the others would all be just throw away shareware. I would never play Free Fall if I was just using a keyboard, but here, it was my favorite. On the other hand, the traditional Tetris-style gaming of The Plank works better with a keyboard than it does here. So, chances are you'll play through all of the games, and eventually settle on three or four to which you keep going back. The others will only be called up when you want to show off what your Mac can do.

Flysight is somewhat of an odd duck in that it's quite fun, and would also be quite fun without the motion detection technology, but it's extremely annoying in that it's exceptionally difficult. Most of the games here are somewhat forgiving of overcompensation, but not Flysight. It's a dogfighting game in which you steer your plane by raising and lowering your hands, but the speed of your enemies will often cause you to waaaaaaayyyyyy overshoot your leading fire. Also, you fire weapons by shouting, "Daga daga daga!" I kid you not. In homage to six-year-old boys everywhere, making machine gun noises actually fires your machine gun. You can hold your mouse in the air and use it to fire if you're sharing the room with others, but seriously. That would just look too weird.

The second thought I had while playing these games was, "This may be the catchiest song in a computer game...ever." A lot of the music was provided by the never-signed, now defunct (I think) band out of England, Deadbeat Radicals. Their lead singer, Sharon Wilson, provided some vocals for Strange Flavour's Airburst, and here, the band for which she sings (sung?) provides an entire soundtrack. If you're at all into that whole kind of alternative, electro/guitar, Brit pop thing (and you should be), then you may find yourself dragging a few of those MP3 files onto your iPod. "Satellite" is the skydiving song, by the way, and why did they have to give us some crappy remix version of "Little Yellow Mini" instead of the far superior original?

Some of the games are designed for two players, while others are for one. I suppose if you're really in sync with someone, though, even the single player games can be controlled by two people. Trying to flap an owl's wings in time with another person is the type of exercise that could destroy a relationship, however. And honestly, this is already difficult enough. You not only have to watch the action on screen, but you also have to keep an eye on where your hands are, making sure they haven't slid away from the defined areas where their movement is recorded. It's a lot to see at once, and it takes many, many tries to get used to it.

And speaking of seeing, I wonder what my neighbors would think if they should happen to look through my window and see me standing in front of my computer, flapping my arms about as if I'm trying to hail a passing ship or conjure up some sort of time demon from the fourth plane. I suppose that, from a distance, it could just look as if I'm doing some new form of exercise, another of those dorky Tae-Bo things, but only for the upper body. That wouldn't be far off, as this game really does give you a good workout. I never knew how rough owls have it. No wonder they spend so much time just sitting on tree limbs...staring at me...coldly...planning their revenge.

Oh, and one word of warning. Although Toysight says it works with any FireWire camcorder, make sure yours isn't set to automatically drop into standby mode if nothing's going on. Although I now have an iSight, I originally tested this game with a DV movie camera that didn't realize it was playing a game, of course, and would therefore shut itself off after a set period of inactivity. If your camera allows you to turn this feature off, no problem. Otherwise, your only option is to actually film yourself playing the game, and...well, we all know what happens when stuff like that gets on the internet.

Owners of the standard Toysight edition may be wondering if the upgrade to the Gold version is worth it. On one hand, $9.95 isn't too much to ask, and the update is a reasonably sized download (although the process of updating your current version is oddly archaic). On the other hand, although the new games are better than over half of what came in the original Toysight, they're still pretty much the same at the end of the day; hands in the air, move them up and down.

What it all comes down to, though, is that Toysight Gold has more of a "wow" factor than even Halo could ever hope for. This makes it great for parties or just showing off, which is probably why there are a few "toys" included that merely add effects—such as transparency, glittery animations, or musical tones—to the actions picked up by the camera. It's pretty cool. As for repeated play of the games themselves, I think that depends upon your set-up. If you have an iSight permanently in place, then yeah, some of these games are certainly entertaining enough to warrant repeated play. If, on the other hand, you have to constantly set up, plug in, and position a FireWire camera normally used for other things, there are other games that offer equal or better gameplay with less hassle.

But Toysight is about the technology, a technology that's been sorely neglected. Strange Flavour deserve a pat on the back, or maybe even a round of pints down at the pub, for being pretty much the only company to date who saw Apple's iSight and asked themselves, "What can we do to make that thing worthwhile?" We're lucky to have these guys on the Mac side...even if they are creeping out my wife.