EA Sports Active: Day 1 (The Optimistic)

I picked up the game yesterday, and just finished my first workout this morning. I'll spare you the before pictures but I weigh 248 pounds. I was originally planning on trying to get below 200 but that definitely won't happen on this 30 day challenge and I don't know if the game will keep me interested long enough after that to do it. So I just won't set a goal as I'm not quite sure whats feasible for the game.

One thing I didn't enjoy was that the first thing the game asked me was for my age, height and weight. I've got a Wii Balance Board sitting right in front of me, why don't you take my weight yourself so I don't have to go into the bathroom and pull out the scale. I also don't like this Bob Greene guy. I don't really care about you being on Oprah, why are you even in the game?

Upon skipping Bob Greene's intro video, I was asked to choose a trainer. I chose the guy since I assumed the woman would be annoying to listen to throughout my 30 days. The trainers primarily introduced all the activities with little videos, but they'd also incessantly give you encouragement during the exercise. That is except when my character was slowing down and speeding up at his own will during the running no matter how even a pace I kept. The running was put at the beginning and end of my routine and by the end I was able to keep an even pace.

Maybe I got better at it or maybe I just learned the limitations of the Wii controls. In the same sense was the inline skating, which was basically just squatting and jumping. It would fail to read my jumps half of the time, so I eventually just took the nunchuk out of the leg strap and would jerk it up as I jumped.

Overall, I think this game has a lot more of a chance to make me lose weight then Wii Fit did. Wii Fit would kick you back out to the menu after every activity and let you choose what to do next. Not only would that make me feel less inclined to do the more strenuous activities, it would break up the momentum of the exercise routine as a whole. With Active, it just throws another activity at you right when you finish the last, so your heart rate never slows and you are told what you should be doing rather then just doing another Ski Jump or Tight Rope Walk like in Fit. We'll see whether that works for me as the challenge continues. Look for another update on Day 5.