Thrillville: Off the rails Demo

So, Thrillville is a kids title. It starts off promising enough in terms of offering cool character customization. The intro movie is a little long, but it looks like a tycoon-type game where you get to build roller coasters. Sounds like fun to me.

There's no real learn-as-you-play:

• On game start, you get 3-4 billboards (A for next).
• While this was brief enough, it was still lame. There's no reason I couldn't discover those hints while I wandered through the level. Non-grounded hints have limited value.

Game play:

• The 3rd person exploration camera is nauseating: It rotates too quickly, has too much gravity, and snaps back too quickly.
• I jumped into the bumper car game
• Not all that fun (no good sound or force feedback)
• It was impossible to tell how I was doing compared to my competitors (I have no idea why I came in 5th)
• When you only have two buttons for controls on a car racing game (accelerate and brake) why not have the buttons duplicated with RT and LT as well (standard racing convention)?
• Now I'm on roller coaster. I can look around with the stick by default, but really the best view is from the external cam.
• It's not all that fun -- I didn't build it and am not very attached to it.
• I sold it.
• I want to build a custom roller coaster, but I'm not sure I can. I seem to only be able to choose from prefabs.
• I tried a dirt bike challenge. It was kind of fun in the way that some free web games are fun (mastering a new skill). But it's not something I would expect to pay money for.
• It looks like the game is more of a tycoon game that, if you want to, you can choose to ride the rides if you get bored of the standard god-game component.
  

All in all, this seemed much more like an XBLA title. I would really want to test it with kids (10+) to see whether they would find it more exciting than I did -- or whether this is more of a marketer's idea of what he/she thinks kids might like.