During a Hudson booth tour, I was able to check out a few upcoming games such as Bonk: Brink of Extinction, Bomberman Live: Battlefest and the WiiWare title Lost in Shadow. I didn’t realize however, that I’d be jumping into my first Kinect experience with Hudson’s Deca Sports Freedom. The Xbox 360 version of the popular Deca Sports series makes use of the no-controller body sensing Kinect device. Everything from menu selection to gameplaying is all done with your body.
The Tanooki’s Features Editor Pete Betcher and myself were up to the challenge, and took part in two of the game’s ten sport offerings. First, a friendly game of tennis. The tennis game was actually a lot of fun. Toss your arm up and swing to serve, shift your body from side to side and swing your arm just like it’s your racket. Controls are as obvious as they seem, and a workout for sure.
The biggest complaint for the game wasn’t a Kinect issue, but rather a visual challenge. The player’s avatar that is positioned closest to the camera is constantly in the way (as pictured to the right). At times, it’s impossible to see where the ball is because your player is blocking it. Instead of just displaying a floating racket, or choosing to add some opacity to my avatar, I was stuck constantly having to guess where the ball was. The issue was so discouraging, it actually put a halt to the fun and we requested a different game after a few serves. I actually don’t remember who won, but since Pete’s not here right now, we’ll say I did.
Next up was Paintball. To play, you stick your arm out straight in front of you as your gun, just like you did as a kid. To shoot, quickly pull your arm up, then returning it back to gun position. To move around, you actually walk around your designated floor space, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. As you move towards the front of your floor space (shown on-screen) your player will move forward. Side to side movements are translated by moving left and right in your floor space. And walk backwards to stop yourself from advancing forward. This is the kind of game where you really will need a good amount of space to play at home, and may not be practical for those with small one-bedroom apartments.
Paintball was pretty fun, and very competitive. Each player is designated to a different colored team. You’ll run around shooting anyone on that team, including your actual player opponent. There are no visual cues as to which player is your real-life opponent, something that seemed kind of odd, considering I naturally wanted to shoot Pete more than the other avatars. You can sort of figure that out however by looking at their side of the splitscreen. The ultimate goal is to have the most hits on the opposing team at the end of the game.
While the actual moving around part takes some getting used to, it’s a lot of fun to run and shoot people with paintballs, although honestly, I just kind of wanted to grab a controller for the moving around part. It felt like the kind of Kinect mini-game that takes practice to get used to the movement controls, but it’s a blast nonetheless. And just like tennis, I dominated.
After our play session, I’m convinced that Kinect technology does work, and that Hudson’s mini-game collection is a great way to show it off. I’m still not convinced of the practicality of playing a lot of these Kinect games unless you have tons of friends who love getting together to play. I’m not sure I could really see myself playing these games alone. Regardless, Deca Sports Freedom seems to be a great option for family and friends to gather around, and enjoy a bunch of motion based mini-games, while looking as ridiculous as humanly possible.
