They had a boxing game at the store and I played for a while and I liked it. So I decided to buy the damn thing. I also grabbed Fighters Uncaged, because I couldn’t find that specific boxing game.
Anyway, I get home, connect the xbox and the kinect camera to my tv and go through the setup sequence and start the Fighters Uncaged game.
It was a huge disappointment. First of all, the game instructs you to keep your legs parallel while playing (I should mention here that I ve done some boxing and kickboxing in the past so I know the basic moves). What fighting is this with legs parallel???
Then the game is slow to respond or won’t respond at all. Even very basic combos like jab-jab-cross or jab-cross-hook cannot be performed.
I got frustrated so I tried the game that came with xbox, Kinect Adventures. This turned out to be even more unresponsive than the other game.
What the heck? Are all kinect games like this? The boxing game at the mall looked rather responsive though.
It’s not just your X-Box.
I had the same issues with “Don King Boxing” on my Wii. In order to advance through the different training levels and access higher caliber fighters you had to show proficiency with the different combos. Of course that proved impossible when the game couldn’t seem to tell the difference between a jab and a hook when done quickly, even when I tried really exaggerating the actions.
Ultimately, that game was shelved.
It seems to me that the whole “motion-controlled” thing is really overrated. There are some Wii games (Wii Sports Resort Bowling; Golf; and Speed Slice) where the motion-control adds to the immersion, challenge and fun of a game, while in others (Spider-Man: Edge of Time and any of the “dancing” games) where the motion-control just seems gimmicky. And still others (Don King Boxing; Red Steel 2) that demand a level of precision that doesn’t seem possible with motion-control and just make the game frustratingly difficult and no fun at all.
I just added a Kinect to my XBox last week. This is in a home theatre environment (projector, remote XBox, etc), so a bit more challenging than the norm.
I had very disappointing results the first time, and running the Kinect tuning generally resulted in fail (dashboard, system tab, Kinect button at far right, IIRC). But then I moved the sensor forward and raised it about a foot, and the sensor tuning went well. The games were MUCH better after that.
All this to say: make sure you run the Kinect tuning apps, and consider changing the sensor’s location. Because of my environment, I also had issues with lighting that had to be addressed.
The reason I didn’t give up right away is because I had the Kinect delivered to a relative’s house where I was vacationing, and it worked perfectly right out of the box (we didn’t even tune it), so I knew the potential the device had.
Kinect is really…fidgety. It DOES work, and better than you describe, but it’s very picky about where you put it, how far you stand from it, etc.
Take Raza’s advice, and run the various tests and whatnot, and try positioning the device at a couple of different heights and/or standing different distances from it and see if it works better.
TL;DR version (or summary for those who can’t get to that URL): Guitar Hero was notoriously bad for actual guitarists. Apparently, hyper-dumbing-down the functional UI (plastic guitar, simulated combat moves) makes actual skilled practitioners of the real-world activity perform badly. These games don’t want to see your actual skills; they want you to master their fake moves, and your actual skills will interfere with that. Like Proactive Interference for procedural memory.
I find that the boxing in Kinect Sports works really, really well. One thing with Kinect is you have to make sure you have enough room and that it’s at the right height. If you are about 8 feet away from the TV and the sensor is about 2-3 feet off the ground, it works really well. Luckily, my TV stand is 2 feet off the ground, and I’ve got plenty of clear space, so I’ve found Kinect to work VERY well for me. My daughter, who is barely 3 feet tall (she’s 3), can get it to work fine if she is the one who begins the game, but if I start it for her, the sensor ignores her entirely. Still, it works very well on Kinect Sports, Once Upon a Monster and Kinectimals even for her. (She’s boxed me several times and it works well). Not sure about your boxing game, but on Kinect Sports boxing, it doesn’t require legs parallel…I’ve had no issues (though you do need to punch deliberately high and low to register punches in the correct spots.)
FTR, the game you bought is currently polling at 32% at Metacritic. Best hardware in the world isn’t going to do you much good if the software is crap.
I have to admit that my first reaction to this thread was a pinch of amusement–what, you expect a game for the masses to teach proper boxing technique?
And then the amusement turned a bit wry: I just bought a Wii, a Wii Fit, and a Zumba game/exercise program. In the hopes that I would be more inspired to exercise and lose some weight and get fit.
And I’ve had some fairly predictable frustrations with the whole Wii Fit thing being obsessed with balance, the aerobic exercises are underwhelming, the yoga and strength exercises are either too easy or too hard, the Zumba bellydance is annoying because it looks like the leader is standing still, but I have to shake my hips a lot to get points (or at least not lose them) . . .
So it’s too soon to tell if I wasted my money, but I think if I supplement Wii with actual aerobic exercise, it ought to do something . . .
As was earlier mentioned, check your environment. Trying to use my Kinect with my 10 month old son crawling around in a recipe for insanity. Not even trying to get into the headache that is the endless “Where’s the baby?! I don’t want to step on the baby!”, him moving around confuses the hell out of it. I’ve seen it looking up and down repeatedly trying to find him again after he crawls behind me, well outside of the play area. Little things make all the difference with it.
And as much as I hate to bring it up, Kinect is still in it’s first generation of production, IF it survives to a second version, I’d expect them to have worked out a lot of the issues involving it losing tracking of the current active player(s).