Natal Ricochet lags and has jittering.

[rover]

Some brand new technology that's multiples more complex than any other control scheme attempted before and isn't going to be released for another year isn't yet ready for prime time?!? :)

To others' (not the OP) comparisons with the Wiimote:

The difficulties and complexities of a system which:

1. uses (relatively) new and (so far) unused tech
2. takes a depth image and uses *completely* new software (being written and tweaked at this moment) to identify and track a person's (or multiple peoples') skeletons in real time

are so vastly greater than any Wii-style remote (two points and an accelerometer) that a comparison between the two as a justification for why there is a problem with Natal's progress is not only a gross simplification, but just underscores some peoples' misunderstandings of how different (and tricky to create) a system like Natal is.

Natal at the moment is not final hardware, not final software, and due to this, the underlying system has few meaningful non-required code optimizations.

In game development (as some who work in games dev here can probably attest) the process is oftentimes: get the thing working properly in as many cases as possible, then, once the functionality is solid (or very nearly so) and the bugs mostly gone, kick in with the optimizations to eek out every last bit of performance. We've all heard stories about a game going from 20fps to 30+ in the last few weeks of development.

Back to this article - here are another few quotes (as we are talking about Natal impressions in this thread, after all):

"Whether you're swinging at a ball, stepping to the side for a kick save, or pelvic thrusting towards a ball like a sex-starved maniac, Natal will convey your motions on to the screen exactly how you'd expect it to"

Beautiful Katamari: "The result is a Katamari game that a newcomer could actually play without struggling to drive the ball around like a tank. Pretty darn cool."

"Ricochet is proof that jumping around like a crazed baboon can be fun. Play it with your girlfriend. Play it with your parents. But most of all play it with your little brother or cousin"