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Video games are important to the West Midlands. The region is home to , and amongst many others. Rare though has a bit of a reputation for being mysterious but it's one they're trying to shake off.

With that in mind we went for a poke about their new Birmingham studio in Digbeth. At the moment the team of around 200 people here are focused on Kinect, Microsoft's new motion control system. A box of tricks that connects to the Xbox 360 and sits on top of your tv.

When we were out in Japan recently we visited the Tokyo Gameshow to see Kinect being demonstrated. Perhaps a noisy, sweltering hot barn on the outskirts of Tokyo filled with thousands of people wasn't the ideal place to see the system working. But this time back in Birmingham and in the peace of a mocked-up living room I was much more impressed.

Nick Burton from Rare was pretty insistent that this isn't a Wii knock-off. Kinect he says is a totally different approach to motion gaming. And it certainly is an impressive piece of technology. As well as cameras that can track the movements of up to four players to an amazing degree of accuracy the system also comes with voice recognition so you can issue instructions to computer controlled characters.

At first I was a bit puzzled about how to play the games. At one point during a volleyball match the game told me to "jump" and I was flummoxed. I turned to ask Nick how to jump. He slowly explained to me that to jump in the game you just jump in real life.

But once I got my head round things Kinect is intuitive and yes different from the Wii and Sony's upcoming Move. And there's no doubt that Rare's launch title Kinect Sports is polished and an extremely effective introduction to the Kinect system. At the Tokyo Gameshow it was easily the best game we saw for the new system.

Rare also helped developed the technology that goes into the Kinect box itself. So the past two years have given the company a real head start in developing for the system. Which means if it takes off it will be another boost to our Midlands video game technology.

The last time Rare featured on Midlands Today was over ten years ago. Nick promised they're a much less secretive company now and it won't be another ten years before we do another story about them. That said when I asked them what they were working on next he said he couldn't tell us just yet.

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