"Fun Arcade Boxing! Ow..."

Konami seems to have taken a shine as of late to improving the abilities of gamers for real world tasks. Up until now, these have been focused in the realms of music (Bemani series) or shooting (Silent Scope and Police 911). Now Konami has taken the next step into the realm of physical combat, and you'll feel it in the morning! Mocap Boxing, Konami's latest entry into the Arcade Sim field runs off of similar hardware as Police 911, as evidenced by the cabinet, method of play, etc.

In Mocap Boxing, you take on the roll of a boxer who's trying to fight his way to the top, and you'll have to fight through many opponents on the way. The controls consist of two glove-like things that are held in each hand, each glove connected to the cabinet by a wire. They look something like fingerless boxing gloves. They aren't too heavy at first, but I'll get to that in a minute. Gameplay consists essentially of dodging your opponents blows by either ducking or weaving (ala Police 911) and waiting for an opening, which is clearly indicated on the screen by a target on the opposing pugilist. When such an opening occurs, you then have to throw a punch, or in many cases, several punches as a combo to lower your opponents energy bar. Get it down three times in a row and you've won. The more punches you dodge, the stronger your attacks get. Fail to dodge, and you life bar goes down, and, in time, your boxer does too. In some cases, the opponent will be stunned, and you'll get to use him like a punching bag. The graphics and sound are nice: they get the job done, but at no point did I panic and actually think I was in the ring or anything. The problems with the game, though, come from its gimmick: the controls.

The controls seem as though the game is still in beta testing. There's a lot of potential, but still some glaring problems. First, the glove type things don't really work the way they seem. In order to score a hit, all you have to do is move your arms about a foot in front of you and wiggle the glove. When the opponent is stunned, hitting the controllers together, as though you were punching your fists together ensures that you will have more than enough time to get all of the free hits in. This isn't the major problem, though. The primary problem arises from the design of the pseudo boxing gloves. They weigh about 4 pounds each, which isn't that much of a problem on its own, but is one of the main contributors to where the game hurts, literally. If you were to punching a padded bag, or something similar, this wouldn't be a problem, unfortunately, you're punching air, and nothing else. This starts to hurt. Granted, I played five games with very little time in between each game, and that's the closest I've come to a real fight in nearly eight years. On my way back to my hotel (I was in town for an anime con), my arms started to hurt a little. This was Friday. Saturday, after I woke up, my back, sides, arms, and pretty much everything between my waist and my jaw ached immensely. While I'm not really muscular, I am pretty much in shape. My sides in particular hurt. By Monday, most of the aches were gone, but my right side still hurt a little till Wednesday. Another, more minor quibble, was that the way the gloves were designed, the back of them rests on the back of the arm, about an inch below the wrist. When you throw punches, most of the weight gets distributed to this spot, thereby putting most of the weight of the gloves onto two square inches of each arm. This, too, adds up. The dodge system works well, though.

The game's difficulty has a pretty steep curve. The first two opponents can be gotten through with very little experience, but in the time I was at the arcade, I saw one person out of about ten (the only one who really knew the game) get to the fourth opponent.

You'll develop real boxing skill by playing this about as much as you'll develop real dancing skills by playing Dance Dance Revolution. You look like you're doing something similar to the game's target activity, but it really isn't. It may get you interested in the real activity, and will help to get you to get in shape. Oh, I completely forgot, the game has a calorie counter in a small window under the life bars. Other extras include a code that replaces the opponent's character models with those of the referees'.

As a game to play heavily to get into shape, I'd steer people over to DDR. But if your looking to kill a few minutes by smacking some guy senseless, you're in the right place. This game has some great ideas behind it, but it needs more refining. I'm looking forward to playing Mocap Boxing Plus, Turbo, or whatever they call the upgrade. The place I played at wanted $.75 to play, and that's worth it to play once or twice.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/08/01, Updated 08/08/01