Virtual Air Guitar Company, the developer, started with, no surprise, a virtual guitar which used a camera and analyzed your movement to play the guitar. Now they’ve moved on to cooler things like live-action Kung Fu games. Myself and Shane have both seen this game in action at shows and now we’ve got it here in the office to play in the comforts of our own confines. Does it live up to all the hype that’s surrounded it?
Well first off, without perfect lighting the game is frustratingly difficult to play. In fact, I have yet to find the perfect lighting setup. It occurs to me that what that really means is overhead fluorescent lights. Since most of us don’t have that kind of lighting at home, you might never find a very good setup to play this game. Secondly, even when it looks like, in the camera setup screen, that you’ve got a good deal going, it still doesn’t seem to work well during actual play.
It seems that without perfect lighting your character constantly floats around the screen. If you try to do a forward kick your character will float off into the air from time to time. Other times it simply won’t register the moves. If you move too fast or too slow it also won’t register.
How fast is too fast? Good luck trying to figure that out. For those of us, like myself, who have actual martial arts training, too fast is anything remotely close to actual speed. Too slow, is a hair shy of just right. So really you’ve got a better shot at not triggering a move than you do at triggering one it seems.
Now like I said, I have yet to find a good lighting situation for the game, even though it gives you all manner of tips on how to set that up. During the day, lighting was poor with the window covered and with the window uncovered. Even though I was wearing a dark red shirt and blue pants it was unable to actually fully discern me from the background which was a dirty white. Apparently you’d need to wear your black ninja outfit for it to fully recognize you against a bleach white background. Really rather disappointing considering how decently it did all of this on the show floor. Of course, they did have those overhead fluorescent lights I was talking about earlier so that’s probably why it worked so extremely well there.
