SSD Company Limited Xavix Gray Console

A few days later, I was reading a fitness magazine that mentioned the boxing game and this peaked my interest again. Unfortunately, there weren't many reviews about Xavix on the net. I read what I could find and then decided to buy. Being concerned about price, I waited and used a 25% off coupon which made the cost a little easier to swallow

What is it?
Xavix is a gaming console, sort of like Playstation. It is smaller, about the size of a personal dvd player. You can buy cartridges for it, that come with the appropriate accessories for the game. Baseball comes with a bat, tennis with rackets, golf with clubs, bowling with a bowling ball, boxing with gloves, and the Jmat aerobic game.

What does it do?
Well, it is interactive gaming. You don't just have a controller, you are playing the game. The Xavix box has an infared sensor and so the accessories. If you are playing tennis, you are swinging a racket in your living room to hit the ball on the tv screen. (virtually, not literally)

What comes with it?
You can buy the xavix controller on its own with no cartridges/accessories. It was 79.99 at LNT. You can buy a controller combo pack which contains the controller and 1 game/accessory. At this time, they offer the combo with tennis, baseball, or bowling. This was 89.99 at LNT. After you have the controller, you can purchase cartridges/accessories. Boxing was $59.99 at LNT. It was a little cheaper when I looked online, but you're probably better off with a 20% coupon at LNT. Plus, it is easy to exchange if you have problems. (I'm getting to that soon.)

Are the games any good?
Well, I'll review boxing here because it is not listed on Epinions. I'll also do a short review of tennis here. The main tennis review will be in the actual tennis cartridge entry.

Jackie Chan Fitness Boxing Review
The boxing game comes with 2 white boxing gloves. Your hands don't really slide inside a pocket. Instead, there are two straps on the inside which you curl your hand under. You enter your name, age, sex, and weight so the game can calculate calories burned. There are 3 modes, exhibition, training, and championship. In the training mode, you learn how to box. There are 4 training options which all have multiple levels.

How hard can boxing with a video game be? I've got news for you, harder than you think. It is a decent work out. The first training option involves trying to hit the punching bag on the screen, x times in x seconds. I'm around level 5 and it is 125 hits 30 seconds. That's difficult. The second training option is to teach balance and quick movement. You keep your gloves together and move to hit/slide across the panels that lights up on the screen. I'm stuck at 70 panels in 30 seconds. The third training option involves a machine that throws balls at you. You punch the balls and need hit a certain percentage to move on to the next level. The first few levels are easy. As you progress, speed and locations change and it gets pretty difficult. The last training option involves learning different punch combinations. The combo flashes on the screen and you need to complete it accurately within the alloted time.

Exhibition and championship games are boxing matches. You fight a player on the screen. Your gloves need to stay in the guard position or the opponent can punch you and "knock you out." You can dodge left and right by actually sliding or leaning left/right. Sometimes the opponent goes into angry mode and you need to dodge or he/she can hit even if your guard is up. Just like real boxing, you try to punch when the opponent's guard is down.

The graphics are a little cheesy and Jackie Chan's comments are silly, but overall I really enjoy the boxing game. The first night I played for about and hour and was very sore the next day. I'm not the fittest person on the planet, but I'm no couch potato either.

Tennis Review
You get two rackets with the tennis game, so you can potentially play against someone else. Though I am concerned about how two people could stand in a living room swinging these smallish rackets in the 8 feet of space the xavix box responds to. I've played single player versus the computer numerous times. This is also more of a workout than I expected. The game responds to the speed at which you swing the racket. There are training modes to practice serving, rallies, serve/return, and ball placement. There are also championship and exhibition games. Unfortunately you don't get to be yourself. You pick from 8-10 player profiles and become that player. There are different types of courts (clay, grass) and also different venues. I'm a fan of the tennis game as well. At the store, I hesitated about buying a game with the controller or just purchasing the controller and boxing. The tennis cartridge with the rackets alone, is way more than the $10 extra I paid to get the combo. But...I didn't think I would like interactive tennis. Xavix proved me wrong.

Setting it up
It comes with a power adapter that the red/white/yellow video/audio cables. Plug everything in and you are ready to go. Popping in the cartridge is a simple as nintendo games used to be.

When I plugged everything in, the video was not working correctly. After playing around for a bit, I found the the output cable wasn't plugged in tightly to the xavix box. After fixing that, boxing worked great. I still had quite some difficulty with the tennis rackets not responding. I tried changing batteries in the rackets, but it still didn't help. (no batteries needed for the boxing gloves) At this point, I decided I didn't like tennis. The second time I went to play, boxing refused to boot up. Tennis still booted, but the rackets were still odd.

I brought everything back to LNT and exchanged for new ones. Guess what? Tennis suddenly worked great and boxing was fine too. I'm glad I bought at a brick and mortar store, so that I could exchange. I'm a little concerned that I bought 2 different pieces and neither worked correctly the first time. 50% isn't the best track record for xavix.

Overall, I do recommend the xavix console and games.