Through a variety of self-defense drills, fitness workouts, and fun mini-games, you will learn secrets to escaping dangerous situations. Get empowered while you get in shape!
Self Defense Training Camp Features
- Reduce Your Risk Of Being A Victim - The game will feature more than 30 real self-defense moves that are taught by real-life self-defense coaches with years of experience.
- Become Confident In Your Abilities - Utilizing Kinect's superior tracking technology, the game will follow your movements and give you immediate feedback that make mastering self-defense moves more accessible to everyone.
- Enhance Your Stamina- Stay physically fit with cardio exercises inspired by martial arts and kickboxing.
- Stay Calm Under Stress - Learn how to stay calm under stressful situations with Tai Chi exercises.
- Sharpen Your Reflexes - Inspired by boxing techniques, test your reflexes with a variety of fun mini-games that will keep you on your toes.
Self Defense Training Camp doesn't replace getting real self-defense instruction from a real trainer, nor does it really pretend to (one of the many random tips it presents throughout the game is to enroll in a physical class to continue your learning). But it is definitely a good introduction to a very important skill all woman (and men) should have.
When you start up, you'll see a number of menu options in this order:
1. Cardio Workout
2. Options
3. Profile and Extras
4. Balance Practice
5. Self Defense Rehearsal
6. Reflex Training
Oddly, #1, #4, and #6 are all locked until you complete a certain number of classes in #5 (which begs the question, why didn't they make that one #1?). There are a number of user interface oddities like that.
You start with "Self Defense Rehearsal". This is a bit of a misnomer. It's not so much "rehearsal" as it is step-by-step training instruction. Specifically, this section is broken into 5 different classes.
1. Wrist Grab situations
2. Arm and Shoulder Grab situations
3. Attack from Behind situations
4. Choke Hold situations
5. Frontal Attack situations
Each of these classes are further broken down into a number of very real and practical scenarios that a would-be victim of an attack may encounter. For example, for Wrist Grab situations, it goes through six scenarios.
1. Crossed Wrist Grab (when the attacker grabs your left wrist with his right hand or vice-versa)
2. Parallel Wrist Grab (when the attacker grabs your right wrist with his right hand or vice-versa)
3. Double Wrist Grab (when the attacker grabs both your wrists)
4. Double Wrist Grab from Behind (when the attacker grabs both your wrists from behind)
5. Side Wrist Grab (when the attacker comes from the side)
6. Choking (when the attacker grabs your wrist with one hand and tries to choke your neck with the other).
The four other classes all each have 6 similarly practical scenarios. Each scenario consists of two phases: a Learning Phase and a Timed Phase.
In the Learning Phase, you start out by seeing a demonstration of the defense technique. Two animated male figures will act out the scenario, with the narrator explaining what's going on step-by-step.
One of the very first things you learn, which is repeated over and over again, is to how kick an attacker in...his most vulnerable spot. Admittedly, it's hard not to snicker the first few times you see the computerized "attacker" get kicked there over and over again. But of course, at the end of the day the point is a serious one--if you're the victim of a real attack, be prepared to use whatever you have at your disposal in any number of situations. Aside from this universal tactic, you do learn important other techniques.
After seeing the sequence played out once, it's broken down into smaller components. You'll see each component demonstrated again by the two male trainers. Then, you (as a female character) can try it yourself. To help guide you, you'll see a white silhouette of yourself in the upper left hand corner, as well as a red silhouette reminding you of the next move you need to make.
The Kinect does a mostly good job of detecting whether you're doing the moves correctly. In some cases I was pleasantly surprised at how accurately it was able to distinguish between subtle movements--for example, the correct move to disarm a wrist grab is to rotate your arm at your elbow. I tried to "trick" the system by just flailing my arm, but it wouldn't take it until I did the proper technique. Having said that, it's not perfect--there were a few cases where I was doing the right moves but the system failed to register it. Similarly, in other cases, I would just twitch and the narrator would exclaim "incredible!" But I'd say for the majority of cases the system is quite accurate.
Once you master the one component properly, the process will proceed to the next one. You'll keep going until you've mastered all five components of the entire sequence.
Then comes the Timed Phase. After you've learned the sequence, you then need to try to execute the whole thing by yourself, remembering what the moves are and in what order to do them. If you execute all the moves, you'll get five stars for the scenario. It's not challenging at all to get five stars, but again it's not supposed to be; again, this is more of a class than a game.
Overall, I found the "Self Defense Rehearsal" section to be helpful, if a little drawn out and tedious. But again, if you approach it like a class and not like a game, it's definitely helpful. And what makes it more powerful than a video is the ability to perform and practice the moves yourself. .
The "Cardio Workout" section, has ten sessions of progressively more intense aerobic fitness exercises that incorporate boxing moves. This part of the game was reminiscent of Gold's Gym Boxing Workout for the Wii. Your trainer will do boxing moves and you need to mimic the moves to a beat. Each move you have to make is both announced by the narrator and shown in timeline of icons to the left of the screen. Overall this provided a decent workout, and of course the motion detection is spot-on. What I wasn't crazy about was that the workouts were all under 4 minutes. And once again you need to "unlock" each lesson one at a time. I would much rather them have provided complete set of cardio boxing routines that each lasted a good 20-30 minutes. As it is, your heart rate is barely elevated after one or even two of these sessions.
The "Balance Practice" section of the game are essentially yoga exercises. You're taken outside the training camp to a beautifully designed garden scene with cherry blossoms, running water, and relaxing bird chirping. Your first session takes you through yoga moves with names like "young deer", "spreading the wings", "buddha pose", and "circle of chi". As with the Cardio section, you mimic an on-screen trainer's moves, while each move is announced and shown in a timeline of icons.
The "Reflex Training" section contains various reflex games where you punch and kick or you try to dodge and block punches and kicks with your virtual trainer. Again, the motion controls are adequate on these, but the exercises themselves are fairly repetitive and uninspired. It's what we've seen in many other games--do a jab, hook, or upper cut in response to instructions from the on-screen trainer, or dodge punches to the left and right.
Overall, I had the same impressions of all three of these "unlockable" sections. They're not horribly executed, but they all feel somewhat incongruous in this particular title. There doesn't seem to be any obvious connection between these activities and the self-defense training. In addition, all of these sections just felt far too short and shallow. I get the sense that the developer was trying to make this a comprehensive "martial arts instruction" title. But it falls a bit short of that. (In fact, after progressing through some rudimentary exercises, you start to earn different colored "belts", which was quite misleading).
It's hard to rate this game, because as I said it's not really a "game". From the perspective of the self-defense training content alone it's very good; in fact, I think it's material that every woman should know.
But in terms of its quality as an interactive game, I'd say there's a lot of room for improvement. For example, it would have been interesting to have a section where you can be "quizzed" where you face a virtual attacker in different scenarios and have to choose the right defensive techniques for the situation.
Something else I found a little disappointing is that your on-screen character doesn't have freedom of motion. In other words, when you go through the exercises, you don't really control the on-screen character directly. Rather, the system will show a still image of the character, and it will only respond once you perform the exercise correctly. I think the title would have been much more powerful if they used real "video game technology" (like the kind you see in fighting games) to let you control your character in a more fluid and dynamic way.
Something else I found a little disconcerting was that the developer invented yet another way of selecting items from a menu--you need to "swipe" to browse through menu options and then "punch" with your right hand to select it. Once again, it's a shame that Microsoft never enforced consistent user interface guidelines to its developers, resulting in dozens of different UI behavior.
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