I had a great time this afternoon in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, trying out Sony's PlayStation Move motion-based control system at a media event. I also shot the video above, showing very preliminary versions of games that use the PlayStation Move, including SOCOM 4 from Sony's Zipper Interactive in Redmond.

Overall, the Move was impressive. The combination of a vision system with handheld, motion-sensitive controllers made for a really precise and straightforward experience when I was lining up my scope and taking out the enemy in SOCOM 4 -- no small feat, given how awful I usually am at first-person shooters.

Ping-pong on the PlayStation Move was especially cool. The camera tracked the path of my swing, and the handheld controller picked up my wicked spin.

The whole thing felt to me like a definite advance over the Wii -- or at least a more sophisticated approach, from a technical standpoint.

But inevitably, in my mind on the drive home, I ended up comparing it to Project Natal, the upcoming motion-based control system for Microsoft's Xbox 360, which I got a chance to try in Redmond a few weeks back.

And I gotta say, after using them both, there's something totally different about needing no physical controller at all. With Natal, it's just your body and that stuff on the screen, nothing separating you from the game. After struggling clumsily with controllers dating back to "Mouse Trap" on my ColecoVision, it felt liberating to be able to rely solely on my body to control the game.

To be clear, that visceral reaction is based on only a few demo games that I've played. I'm sure Kevin Butler would not approve. I reserve the right to change my mind after I get more experience with both systems, and with more games that use them. As one of the guys in the video says, it's ultimately less about the hardware than it is about what developers do with it. And in that way, the Move has a ton of potential.