captaind's Full Review: EA Sports Active for Nintendo Wii
EA Active is the latest way to use your WII to get fit. It has a different emphasis to WII Fit, which focuses a lot on balance, and offers you a variety of track, sports, and muscle-building exercises to help fight the flab. I've seen it described as a "Western" workout programme as opposed to WII Fit's "Oriental" style workout plan, which is probably a pretty fair assessment. For developing muscle strength and burning calories I'd rate it very highly and rarely use WII Fit anymore (though I still feel that WII Fit is a good product, EA Active is better suited to my needs).
The real key to EA Active is the resistance band - this makes it possible to do muscle and resistance training. You can shorten or lengthen the band's position relative to the hand grips if you need to make your work-out harder / easier (be very careful to tie the band tightly onto the grips though). This works much better than I was expecting it to and you can definitely use the exercises to build muscle as well as burn calories.
EA Active certainly gives you a good workout, and because it features a large number of different, short workouts, it doesn't get boring. Some are quite undemanding while others are very challenging indeed.
While it's a very good product overall, EA Active does have a few problems. With some of the exercises you really could do with having a wireless nunchuck, as if you perform the tasks with any enthusiasm it's easy for the connecting cable between the Wiimote and nunchuck to get tangled up and / or in the way. The resistance band can work itself loose if you're not careful, and the thigh strap frequently starts slipping down. The problem with the resistance band only really persists until you've worked out exactly where you want it and tie a really strong knot there... the thigh strap continues to be a bit of a pain even after weeks of trying to get it to stay put.
The trainers can get very annoying, though they can be turned off to an extent and it's strangely therapeutic to hurl abuse at them while you're exercising! The female trainer does have a certain "I want to have your babies" quality to her voice when you're doing well, which is frankly quite disturbing. On odd occasions the game tells you you're doing it wrong at the same time that the trainer's praising you for doing it right - though this is only a slight and un-troubling inconsistency.
One of the good things about this program is that it automatically schedules rest days (after 2 or 3 days of working out), and if you skip a day you should have been working out, it simply reschedules that as a rest day. In the 30-Day Challenge, you work out 20 of the days with the others scheduled as rest. Of course you can do extra workouts if you want on any of the days.
While the pre-programmed workouts are good and quite fun, the option to create your own custom workouts is definitely a strong selling point. With a huge number of exercises based around circuit training, resistance training and sports exercises, in addition to being able to vary the intensity of the workouts, gives you great freedom to make up a workout of exercises you enjoy, focus on a particular muscle group, etc.
The game tracks the calories you've burned based on your profile, and how much effort you put into an exercise genuinely does make a difference - it's not simply tracking each rep as a set value of cals. There are various trophies you can earn as you complete certain objectives - i.e. 100 / 1,000 / 10,000 calories burnt, 25 laps of the running track, 200 tennis swings completed, etc. There are 30 such trophies and some you'll earn quickly, others will take a fair amount of time. It's a nice additional motivation for you as you keep working out.
You can use the game with or without the balance board - certain exercises can be done with it in a slightly different way. It doesn't really matter if you don't have a balance board, but it does give you a little extra variety if you have one. In-line skating, for instance, is completely different using the balance board (and a lot less painful!).
The graphics are nice, nothing amazing but give you a good sense of the outdoors or sports area you're supposed to be in. The backgrounds have a slightly surreal quality, looking more like an oil painting really than a game, but it works well. Player animation is fluid and realistic - though the graceful onscreen movements do not always accurately reflect what you're managing to do in real life! Setting up your profile includes creating an avatar for yourself, and it's easy to create a character who looks very similar to yourself. There is a decent range of music in various styles available throughout the game, and all of the music is very good (though I don't always agree with the category it's described as being!).
To give you some idea of what you will end up doing in EA Active, here are some examples:
Another good thing about the game is that it combines exercises after you've done them a couple of times, for instance upright rows with tricep extensions or more complex combinations of tennis shots etc. This helps to keep things interesting and motivates you to push yourself further. This really is a very well thought-out exercise programme, especially if you use the 30-Day Challenge mode.
Other good things about this game (well, I suppose "program" or "package" would be a more appropriate description) is that you can set targets for yourself in terms of calories burned, workouts completed or time spent working out. The slight problem with this is that if you change anything, it resets completely - very annoying the first time you change it only to find that day's workout doesn't count. Still now that you've read that, maybe you won't make the same mistake that we did!
Overall EA Active isn't a perfect product, but it is very good at what it does - I can definitely feel the difference in my muscles compared to before I started using it. The way it combines a large number of short activities helps to keep things interested, and certainly has kept this reviewer (whose attention span would often be beaten by a goldfish) interested. If the thigh strap wasn't so problematic, I would have given this five stars despite its occasional weaknesses - but even so, it's an extremely solid 4 stars and definitely worth getting if you're interested in getting fit and losing weight without leaving the house.
Introducing EA SPORTS Active exclusively for the Wii. Designed in collaboration with fitness experts, EA SPORTS Active gives you fun, easy to learn ex...More at J&R Music and Computer World
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