Eye Toy: Kinetic is a video game with the purest intentions. It wants you to get up off your rump, and it wants you to put down the bucket of chicken, and it wants you to go pour the rest of your 2L Double Gulp in the sink, and then it wants you to do some exercises until your heart pounds and you get all sweaty. Which, considering the chicken and the Double Gulp, should only take a few minutes.

Kinetic is more personal trainer than game. There is no way to win, although the more you practice the more you will improve and the more fun you'll have at it. Maybe the producers are thinking that a cardiovascular system that doesn't burn out in your late 30s is reward enough. Fair enough.

The game requires (and includes) the EyeToy, which is a little camera that sits on top of your TV. As in other EyeToy titles, you are the star of the show, which can be deeply disappointing for people used to next-generation computer graphics, with their taut digital abs and their perky digital bums and their sprightly digital boobages. To see yourself starring in a video game is to realize that you are ugly and doughy and that for every smooth kick you manage, there is a corresponding wobble about your midsection. This is if the light in the room is flattering and you are wearing stylish workout gear. In dimmer circumstances, your complexion takes on a sickly jaundice and the focus goes all to crap and you begin to look like the bad-guy-in-the-TV from one of those Japanese nü-horror movies.

So you won't be playing the thing for the pictures. That's OK. You will be playing because you know you have room for improvement. You are committed to getting fit and staying fit, and this time you're really going to make it happen. Congratulations. Now all that remains is the exercise itself. And how is that?

It is middling, which is a disappointment. Most Eye Toy games are variations on a single theme: Wave arms wildly, trying to hit on-screen targets. Kinetic is too, despite the Lululemon vibe of the presentation. It is true that flapping your arms hard for an hour or two will get your heart beating, but it is also true that there are many kinds of exercise that are more fun and less frustrating. Running up and down the stairs, for example. Or swimming.

All the activities in Kinetic are divided into “zones,” the most important of which are called Cardio, Combat, and Mind and Body. In Cardio, targets fly around the screen and you attempt to smack them, sometimes with your hands and sometimes with your feet. Actually, never with your feet. The friendly and enthusiastic on-screen silhouette who plays along with you is all about the kicking, and also about the flourishes and the twirls and the little leapings-around between targets. But you, the freshly-reformed chicken bucketeer, will find that everything on the screen is within arm's reach, and you will also find that your groin hurts when you try those kicks, so you will soon settle into a hands-only style of play, your best intentions notwithstanding.

In Combat, you are also waving at targets, but there is a bigger focus on how hard you smack them. The idea in principle is that you should use martial-arts moves for the smacking, but you will find that there are no points for grace or style, and you will adopt a clumsy open-palmed wave as your attack of choice. In Mind and Body, where there is a premium on balance and accuracy, you will indeed balance on one foot, but you will not find the experience spiritual or contemplative. You will look like a flamingo with a prawn caught in its throat.

This is OK. Really it is. The only people who look good exercising are the ones who are already fit. But there is something singularly tough about seeing yourself, like this, on the screen. TV is for hot people.