We’d heard that Kinect Sports: Season Two would be part of the Xbox 360 and Kinect presence at the Birmingham NEC’s inaugural GAMEfest event, so even though no official Rare attendance was required for demo or interview duties, a few of us still headed over to scope it out on the first day. Well, 20 minutes down the M42, it would have been rude not to.

The show turned out to be a good size and well-publicised, the usually labyrinthine route from the NEC car parks lined with posters and flags. It was clear upon sweeping through the entrance that it was also set to be well-attended. Of course we’re not talking E3 or Gamescom here, but with no shortage of pre-release big hitters – from Arkham City and Skyrim at one end to the Big Threes (Gears, Battlefield and Modern Warfare) at the other – the queuing action was nothing to be sniffed at.

Kinect Sports: Season Two nestled contentedly in the middle of all this, spread across a good-sized space with a couple of supervised setups and a healthy line of budding virtuathletes, a word we promise faithfully to never use again. The prominence of Darts and Tennis suggested that we were looking at the Gamescom build, which just so happens to translate pretty well to a home turf UK audience… almost as if it was all planned. And there were people of literally all ages lining up for a go. Alright, not literally all ages, that wouldn’t be practical, but people of distinctly different age groups.

Still in the zone from chucking Kinect Sports javelins over at the stand of show sponsor GAME, producer Mike rolled up to exhibit his mastery of Darts in Season Two, eventually forcing out a couple of lucky 140s while muttering about the unfamiliar height of the sensor. Nobody was fooled. We hung around for a while, watching people swing, fling, rally and score, and kept drifting back throughout the day to see how it was going. The players and attendants seemed well up to the task of generating their own lively shenanigans without us barging in and preaching backspin, line call objections and 170 checkouts, so for the most part we kept our oars firmly out.

Kinect stretched its tentacles from one end of the show floor to the other. Dance Central 2, The Gunstringer and Leedmees were all luring in the punters within shouting distance of the Sports lair, while games like Once Upon a Monster, Rise of Nightmares, Your Shape 2 and Raving Rabbids brought gesture-based jiggerypokery to the stands of their respective publishers. Not a bad show for the arcane arts of motion gaming in what at first glance seemed to be a moderately hardcore shootfest of an event.

We had plenty of fun during our incognito meanderings: there was no sign of Jason Bradbury from The Gadget Show to unassumingly stalk as we like to do at these events (it’s fine, he never even knows about it) but brazenly interrupting a shoot to catch a few words with Julia Hardy from The Blurb more than made up for that. We hope that all who stepped up to give Season Two a good crack of the whip walked away beaming too.