The East Coast got its own taste of the newest Xbox 360 toy yesterday at the Microsoft Preview event held on Manhattan’s west side. It was a shindig for all of Microsoft’s pursuits, from Windows 7 to Office to Arc mice and keyboards to, of course, Kinect. The company showed off the product in all its flailing glory, highlighting several upcoming titles for the device.

In general, Kinect felt very much like a beta, or a proof-of-concept input device. It tracked my arm and body movements reasonably well, but got tripped up when I moved my legs. It also felt very laggy, with pauses up to a full second for gestures to process. In fairness, it was a large room with awkward lighting unlike most living rooms, so maybe it’s more accurate in a smaller, more conventional home theater setting.

I tried two games first-hand: Kinect Adventure and Kinect Joyride. Kinect Adventure is a travel-themed minigame compilation, and Kinect Joyride is a cartoonish stunt racing game. In Kinect Adventure, I played a handball-like minigame that had me batting a ball against a wall to break targets. It was a two-player game, and a colleague stood to my right on his side of the “court” to hit the ball when it came near him. More than once, we almost accidentally smacked each other.

Kinect Adventure tracked my arm movements well and I generally hit the ball when it came above my torso, but latency problems caused me to miss a handful of shots. I could occasionally lean to headbutt the ball, but the Kinect didn’t detect any forward motion so it just bounced harmlessly off my avatar’s stationary skull. My legs were almost entirely useless, with the Kinect refusing to detect my kicks until a full second after the ball flew by.

After Kinect Adventure, I took a spin in Kinect Joyride’s solo stunt mode. The control was very similar to Mario Kart’s Wiimote control: hold your hands out as if you’re holding an invisible steering wheel (or, in Mario Kart’s case, a plastic steering wheel with a Wiimote lodged inside), and pantomime steering to drive the car. It actually controlled worse than Mario Kart’s Wiimote control, and neither tight, realistic turns of my arms or wide, flailing gesticulations quite translated into turning the wheel just right. With no buttons to push, my only control of acceleration was a boost I could activate by leaning back and shoving forward, an act that worked 3/4rds of the time.

Kinect seemed to work very well in one game, which I didn’t try first-hand out of fear of blinding the entire room with my whiteness. The device is tailor-made for Dance Central, Harmonix’s answer to Dance Dance Revolution. You have to emulate the dance moves on screen, and as far as I could tell the moves translated quite well. I watched 2D-X editor Jeff Wilson score high on Bel Bib Devoe’s “Poison.” And now you can watch him too:

Those be some mad skills.

I’m not entirely sold on Kinect. The games I tried controlled awkwardly and the complete lack of physical feedback makes the wild flailing required by some games even more dangerous than playing Wii Golf without a wriststrap. The Microsoft representatives at the event wouldn’t confirm whether the $150 Kinect would come with a game, but currently Amazon is accepting preorders for both the Kinect (with no advertised pack-in bundle) for $150 and every announced Kinect game for $60 each. Pretty steep if Microsoft isn’t planning on including a game.