EA Sports Active, part the second

• Posted on May 31, 2009 at 4:58 pm

So I’ve played with it a little more. This morning I put together a little stupid quickie workout:

1. Heavy bag: beat the hell out of a heavy bag; I had to punch it 300 times this time around, which goes faster than it sounds, really
2. Inline skating: basically, squat jumps with emphasis on the squat, which is where you stay most of the time. The lower you squat, the faster you go. Then when you hit the green part of a ramp, you jump to do tricks
3. Easy dance: Stupid easy DDR for your hands, at this level. Arrow comes down, you point the Wiimote or Nunchuk in the direction it tells you to point it and occasionally do some other goofy moves
4. Running: Once around a virtual track this time, running in place with the Nunchuk in the little thigh thingy. The faster you run, the less stupid your avatar looks. Really.

This took about five minutes to do this morning before I went to Academy on a mission to replace the weaksauce resistance band. Which I did, at a cost of about $14 for a pack of three–the lightest one in the pack is still heavier than the one the game comes with, and just for shits and giggles I just pulled the heaviest one out of the pack, tugged on it a little, went “LOL SHIT” and put it away for now.

Fair warning: if you get heavier bands, you’re probably going to want to use some kind of gloves or tape or some means of protecting your hand from the naked nylon strap handle rubbing against the tender webbing between your thumb and fingers–and the more cushiony handles that come with exercise tubing sets won’t work if you have tiny hands like mine, because you still have to be able to hold the Wiimote and Nunchuk. The heavier band did not quite rub a blister when I went back to do an upper body workout a few minutes ago, but a few more sets of whatever and it might have.

Also the concern was raised on the official forum that using a different band might render the in-game calorie burn count inaccurate, but a) it’s going to show you burning less than you actually burned, not trick you into thinking you’ve burned more than you actually have, which is fine by me, and b) WHO CARES, MY ASS IS OFF THE COUCH, LET’S BE HAPPY WITH THAT AND NOT SPLIT HAIRS OKAY.

Anyway, I got bored a little while ago and fired up the preset easy upper body workout. This was about a 20-minute mixture of resistance band stuff and boxing. This time, I got to beat up targets. If you hit them hard enough, they break. This is good, because punching shit and making it break is fun. And then you hit a heavy bag a hundred times or so and go back to band stuff and repeat this a few times. See, the big difference between this and My Fitness Coach: when you ask it for a 30-minute upper body workout, you are going to get 30 minutes of upper body workout, not 10 minutes of cardio and 5-10 minutes of surprise crunches. (which reminds me of one of this game’s few shortcomings, but I’ll get to that in a bit)

I am not an Amazon by any stretch of the imagination, but I can lift some fairly heavy shit if called upon to do so. My arms are about to fall off. And I did the easy upper body workout. Yow.

Now one small problem: the assortment of exercises is great, but it fails in one area–there’s upper body and lower body and cardio, but there’s no core. Well, there’s the cross knee punches, and some twists and stuff, but as for crunches and such, there are none. No pushups either. But hell, people, we all know how to do those things, right? And really, squeezing a few crunches in here and there is not a problem.

And finally, you could probably fool the system into thinking you’re doing the exercises by wiggling the Wiimote in just the right way, but hell, if you’re going to go to that much trouble you might as well just suck it up and do the damn exercises.

In conclusion: IT’S A KEEPER

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EA Sports Active: ooooooshiny

• Posted on May 30, 2009 at 10:30 pm

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.

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