EA Sports Active: ooooooshiny

Yeah, I got it today. And I haven’t played much with it yet on account of still being kind of full from dinner and all, but I like what I’ve played with so far.

Up till now I’ve been using My Fitness Coach, and while there are a lot of things I like about it:

• decent music selection
• better workout than Wii Fit, at least according to reviews, also much much cheaper
• nice scenery
• lets you use a step and stability ball and dumbbells
• the yoga workouts are great
• ability to get credit for stuff you do out in the real world
• Maya, your virtual personal trainer, is totally hot (and unlike a real personal trainer, if you are having a bad day you can flip her off when she goes “looks like you could do this all day! :D” in the middle of the bazillionth set of two-count crunches she throws at you)

…there are a lot of things I’m not so thrilled about.

• requires more unobstructed floor space than I really have
• doesn’t really use the Wiimote for anything but menu stuff
• the “was that too hard/too easy/just right” response buttons that appear when Maya asks for feedback on a given segment of a workout are way too small, especially when one is kind of huffing and puffing one has to aim carefully, because it is way too easy to accidentally hit “that was too easy” when you meant “OH GOD PLEASE KILL ME NOW” and you cannot take it back (okay, I’ve never needed to hit the “OH GOD TOO HARD” button, but seriously, these buttons are tiny)
• keeps doing this “use the step, now don’t use the step, now use the step, now don’t use the step” thing that requires me to stop what I’m doing and kick the step out of the way/drag the step where it needs to be or else just modify everything to use the damn step, thanks to the first bullet point
• although every workout is different and usually there’s a nice mix of things to keep my short attention span happy, every once in a while I’ll get a lower body workout that’s the warmup, the obligatory cardio, and then NOTHING BUT LEG LIFTS FOREVER until the minute of cooldown, wtf
• every workout except the yoga stuff is about 1/3 cardio which I would usually really rather just skip because 90% of the time, I’m doing this after I get home from work and possibly some shopping, which means I’ve just spent at least 15 minutes or so on the bike and I do not pedal anywhere at a leisurely pace ever, you know that bike douchebag who’s always riding like s/he’s humping through the bike leg of the Ironman Triathlon, well, I am that douchebag. I usually and up doing it anyway, and yeah, I could just sit it out or do something else while Maya is telling me to grapevine and step-touch and skip up and back and whatever, but I still wish I could just skip straight to the good shit.
• the stupid Physical Challenge every ten workouts that is normally not a big deal but you can’t get credit for outside activity until you do the damn two-minutes-of-jumping-jacks and pushups and crunches and squats and especially the squats because there’s no point in me even doing the squats on the damn challenge because I can do more than the maximum amount you can even enter and this one that came due yesterday oh ffs there was no way in Hell I was going to come in from biking home and then going out to run day 2 of Couch to 5K and then do the stupid jumping jacks-pushups-crunches-etc. thing I don’t care how hot Maya is there is a limit to how much my ass can move in one day but pencilwhipping it is just lame and it doesn’t even count as your workout, so if you have no meatspace activity to log you have do this half-hour or so of lame shit on top of the normal 15/30/45/60 minutes–can you tell when I decided to put this one on the shelf and only drag it back out for the yoga, can you

…so I’ve been kind of anticipating EA’s answer to this, because I’d heard about the neat little leg holster for the Nunchuk and the assortment of sports-related activities and such.

Again, I haven’t gotten to play with it much yet, but so far, I really like it. It actually uses the Wiimote and nunchuk–and you have to actually do the exercises. Unlike Maya, these nameless virtual trainers know when you are slacking. It shows you, in great detail, how to do exercises you haven’t done yet. The resistance band that comes with it is kind of weaksauce, at least for me, but heavier ones are readily available and fairly cheap. It has nifty little sports drills which I haven’t tried yet, but they look like fun. It also lets you take credit for meatspace activities, and it has a more comprehensive list of them. If you have Wii Fit, it has some stuff that uses the balance board. If not, it works just fine without. There is a long, long, long list of preset workouts of varying difficulties and types available to choose from, and if you don’t see anything there you like, you can build your own. If you don’t want the 15-20 minutes of cardio, and want something else instead, you don’t have to sit through shit you don’t want to do or wing it, you can just pick and choose.

So I am really liking it so far.

Originally published at Fire of Unknown Origin. You can comment here or there.