Negative Gamer Review: EA Sports Active (Wii) Week One

EA Sports Active isn’t your usual type of game, and as such this isn’t going to be your usual type of review. The main selling point is the 30 Day Challenge, a series of daily exercises that increasingly test your physical fitness by tracking your motions with the Wii Remote and nunchuk.

I decided that the only fair way to review EA Sports Active was to do weekly mini-reviews during the 30 Day Challenge. Regular readers will notice that I’m a little off schedule since my haiku impressions were over a week ago. A busy week meant no time for exercise, but now I’m back on track. On with the first mini-review:

Working the core audience

When booting up EA Sports Active for the first time, it’s clear who EA are marketing this to. When entering your personal information for the first time, the default choice is a woman in their mid-20s.

From there you choose between two virtual personal trainers – I went with the woman, scared that the impossibly muscle-bound man would just call me a wimp before shouting “drop and give me twenty!”

You can jump straight in to a workout, or design one of your own, but as I said the meat of the game is the 30 Day Challenge. This actually means only 20 days of exercise – the other 10 are “rest days”, and believe me, you’ll need them.

Can we patch in the fun?

If you hate everything waggle, and don’t feel the need to get fit, EA Sports Active is definitely not for you. Whilst you could complete the exercises sitting in a chair and faking the motions, I’m not sure what the point would be. As an exercise tool, EA Sports Active is pretty decent and makes you work up a sweat. As a game, it’s terrible.

About half of the exercises are literally just that – you are presented with a virtual representation of yourself, accompanied by the trainer, and you complete a certain number of reps. The rest are dressed up in some sort of “game”, like dancing (pretty dull) or in-line skating (brutal on the thighs). It would have been nice to make all of the exercises into mini-games, to encourage you to play more.

Speaking of encouragement, throughout the exercises the trainer cheers you on with a variety of platitudes. To begin with I found this mildly encouraging, but quickly turned them and the awful music off. Now I workout out to the NGCast – what could be better?

One nice touch is the inclusion of Achievement-like trophies for reaching targets like 25 laps on the track, 1 hour of exercise, and so on. You can also set goals for yourself for number of calories burnt and other statistics.

Where am I meant to keep all of this stuff?

That’s the basics of the software, but no Wii game is complete without a peripheral. As you might expect, EA Sports Active comes with some plastic tat in the box to go along side your guitars, drums and whatever else is rapidly filling up your living room.

The leg strap is designed to wrap around your right thigh to act as a pouch for the nunchuk in order to track your lower body movements. During my first exercise session it slipped off all the time, but when I tried the next day with a different pair of trousers made from different material it wasn’t so bad. You have to wear it quite tight though.

The resistance band, used for increasing the difficulty of upper body exercises, is terrible. It offers about as much resistance as wet newspaper, and whilst I haven’t gotten round to replacing it with a proper one, I soon will.

EA Sports Active also supports the Wii Balance Board, if you’ve previously bought Wii Fit and shoved it in a cupboard, but I don’t have one so I couldn’t test this functionality.

A few other points worth mentioning:

• In every workout session so far, I have exceeded the predicted “calories burnt” figure. Whether they under-predict to encourage you, or I’m just awesome, remains to be seen.
• There is a journal which you can fill out with what you ate the previous day and whether you did any other activity. This is almost completely pointless.
• The character creator is fairly bland, and the rest of the visuals are nothing exciting. You’ll be too busy sweating to really notice however.

Even with all of these complaints, I do find myself going back to EA Sports Active for a regular workout. Whether I keep up with it through the entire 30 Day Challenge remains to be seen though – so check back next week for the Week 2 mini-review.