Developed for the Nintendo Wii by EA Canada
Published by Electronic Arts
Rated “E” for Everyone
A year after Wii Fit’s release we finally have an exercise program worthy of continuing the craze that Nintendo started, offering a more sophisticated fitness regimen with a larger catalog of exercises and a body-tracking system that does not need the balance board to work. EA Sports Active delivers a strong focus on aerobics and cardio-based workouts that are programmed into a thirty-day challenge based on your personal profile. The target to reach each day is a number of calories burned, not the pounds lost. The idea being, if you make that figure your high score, the weight loss will take care of itself.
Although there are a selection of exercises included that can be used with the Balance Board, EA Canada’s aim was to create a system that would work without it. Not just so they could sell a less expensive solution, but also to create a fitness program that could be released for other game consoles such as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, both rumoured to be adding their own motion-control systems soon.
The good news is they’ve succeeded. EA Sports Active measures your movements through two points; the Wii Remote held in one hand and the Nunchuk accessory strapped to the front of your thigh thanks to an included thigh-band accessory. As you move through lunges, side-jumps, and squats, the sensor bar tracks the changes between the two controllers and the difference between the two points helps it sense whether you’re doing the maneuvers correctly.
Other exercises include variations on walking and running, kicking, punching, and dancing, and sports-related routines where you mime aspects of baseball, basketball, inline skating, tennis, and boxing.
By abandoning the balance board as the focus, they’ve had to sacrifice exercises where balance is key. Excluded are the yoga poses, hula-hooping, and strength training exercises including push-ups, jackknives, and planks that helped give Wii Fit its diversity.
To compensate, the box includes a resistance band, a length of red elastic that you step into and wrap around your hands to provide a degree of tension for performing bicep curls, upright rows, and shoulder presses. I predict these exercises may not go over too well with male users, it’s not the most manly of exercises, and personally I miss my push-ups and jackknives as a solution for toning abs.
The real issue with the resistance band is that it can take too long to set up. In one thirty-minute program you’ll be asked to perform through sixteen to eighteen different exercises, quickly switching between those that use the thigh-strap, the basic controls, the resistance band, or the balance board. Stepping in and out of that piece of elastic, well, it’s easy to become tangled and frustrated.
In terms of instruction and motivation, EA Sports Active excels, including both video clips of live instructors performing the moves slowly to give you a sense of how to do them in advance and animated instructors to guide you and keep you on time during the routines. Your instructor’s voice is a constant source of praise and feedback, delivering surprise and kudos when you reach past the set goals.
Before each workout the program “predicts” how many calories it thinks you’ll burn and then afterwards displays a graph that shows just how and where in the workout you manage to dip above or below that prediction.
Music is a large presence here, with a customizable soundtrack featuring 41 songs spanning Hip Hop, Dance, Electronica, and Alternative Rock, none of them objectionable even if you’re not a fan of any of those genres. What’s missing is the option to play your own music files, added to the Wii through the SD memory card slot. I have to imagine EA Canada thought of It, I wonder why it wasn’t possible?
A big part of my success with Wii Fit was its library of locked content, wanting to discover all of its hidden exercises is what kept me playing it, week after week. EA Sports Active offers a massive library of unlockables that includes special medals for reaching specific goals. There are bronze, silver, and gold trophies to unlock for attaining key achievements such as completing 101 exercises, making 200 hits in volleyball, working out with a friend, and burning 10,000 calories amongst others. Trying to earn all thirty trophies should keep most users active long after the first few weeks or months have passed.
As the software has no way of measuring your weight, not even if you do have a balance board, it’s up to you to enter in your details. From there it will create a calendar of workouts in response, offering each day a choice of light, medium, or heavy workouts based on the profile given. Each day the routine differs, but always with a program that includes warm-ups and cool down exercises. You have the option, of course, to go into the settings and create your own workouts, choosing your favorites and creating your own daily routine.
One refreshing option is the ability to workout with a friend. The screen is split into two and you both perform to your own virtual trainer, playing along just as two players do in other Wii games.
While there are no light games, such as Wii Fit’s hula-hoops or tightrope walking challenges, there are a number of sports games where you can slide down a hill on a skateboard, trying to avoid rows of cones or step onto a basketball shooting range where you must shoot balls at targets as they pop out of the walls. The volleyball moves are very interesting, allowing you to act out digging and setting just as you would in real life, and I predict the kick boxing, which include both knee and kicking attacks plus cross-hitting as well as punching, will be among the most popular exercises included and very rewarding to those who do have a balance board.
Although the range of exercise types isn’t as diverse as I had hoped, with perhaps too much of a focus on cardio workouts, the fact remains that EA Sports Active matches if not improves upon Wii Fit’s own fitness success, delivering features that fans have cried out for including more exercises, better music, better graphics, a deeper rewards system, and the ability to workout with a friend. For those who have become comfortable with working out in front of the television, let the toning and slimming continue.
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