The last couple of days I have been quite busy. Amazon managed to deliver my new EA Sports Active: Personal Trainer (Wii) game on the very Friday before the long weekend here in the UK. I must agree with someone mentioning recently that we are really spoiled by Amazon these day, especially when it comes to item delivery… I always go for Super Saver, which states 3-5 business days, but more often actually gives you next day delivery. Great way of getting a loyal customer base there…

I have enjoyed Wii Fit (Wii), but after a while it does get slightly repetitive and the UI isn’t great for proper workouts, I’d love to be able to adjust the length of the yoga positions for example. And yes, you can just do several in a row, but having to go through the comments and the score and the gazillion buttons on the way, just to get another 2 minutes… well you guessed it.

It was very disheartening when I read an article some time ago about how Wii is actually built, which essentially killed any hopes for a major update for Wii Fit to be released. So it was either what you have now, or waiting for Wii Fit 2…

In the mean time I tried a few other games that either use the Wii Balance Board, or are linked to physical activity. It is quite shocking how under used the Balance board is. I had a go at the All Star Cheerleader (Wii), which is quite fun, until you do try to use the board with it. Again a bit of a fail on the UI side. Instead of initializing it once, it does the board initialization every single time you start a sequence, so basically you spend 50% of the time waiting and 50% playing.

Then I decided to go fit more seriously and got the Sports Active. The videos and advertising set my expectations quite high and I must say I haven’t been disappointed. The interface is pretty, and quite well polished, definitely a step forward in the right direction. The game is easy to navigate and fills in Wii Fit’s biggest gap - workout sequences.

There is a fair number of ready made workout sets - great for people like me, who usually if left alone would skip the warm up and cool down phase and just stick with the three or four activities I like over and over again. Which as anyone can probably figure out can quickly lead to the routine becoming boring and possibly not as effective as it could be.

However Sports active does not stop there, and for more advanced fitness users you can create your own workout - in fact you can create more than one of those, so you could have less and more lively routines depending on your mood. The interface for creating the workouts is simple and intuitive. I really liked the fact that it shows how much cardio, lower and upper body you chose, and the set length. You can also adjust the intensity too!

At the moment I have been following the 30 day challenge route, and I must say even though the workouts are only around 30 minutes long they really get you sweating. The feedback that you are given is I would say at a good level - not too much to get annoying, but enough to give you a nudge here and there as well as motivate you to finish off the last few reps if needed. Worth noting is that I have actually seen a slider in the options menu about the feedback verbosity, so there is a good chance that when you do start getting annoyed with an overly cheerful virtual trainer you could possibly quiet them down…

Now for a few gripes I found. The very first thing that you will notice - lack of scales functionality! Why oh, why, none of the fitness games other than Wii Fit seem to incorporate that seemingly simple feature? You have optional support for the balance board during the exercises, so you would think it wouldn’t be that hard to push it this little bit further.

Second thing is the system sensitivity. My place isn’t huge, so I’m not always exactly lined up with the tv, and sometimes the controls had a slight problem picking up that, yes I am doing it correctly. Though a lot of these can be figured out after you have done the exercise a few times, as the requirements for controller positioning are not as complex as you might think.

Overall however I have been pleasantly surprised with Sports Active, and even have been looking forward to my daily workouts - that’s a shocker!