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It Gives You a Good Workout but Tests Your Patience, November 16, 2010

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3 1/2 stars out of 5

The “2″ in EA Sports Active 2 is actually a little misleading. The first EA Sports Active came out for the Wii in May of 2009, and the second, titled “More Workouts,” came out 6 months later, adding much needed core exercises. This game, in essence, is the third in the series. Needless to say, I’ve been a fan of the franchise for a while, and it has been a great addition to my workouts. I decided to sell my Wii recently and upgrade to XBOX and Kinect, especially after hearing EASA 2 would be out soon after launch. However, being the third iteration in the series, this title for the XBOX is a bit of a step backwards.

Pros:

+ The addition of a heart rate monitor is great! It’s accurate, stays put on my forearm even during the boxing workout, and it’s easy to connect.
+ No more Wiimote and Nunchuck getting in your way. You don’t have to decide between having the leg strap fall off of you or cut off the circulation to your right foot. This allows you to finally use your own weights instead of the included resistance band. There is even a setting adjustment for players wanting to take advantage of this feature.
+ The included resistance band is much more… resistant than the previous band. Your arms will now feel the burn on curls, raises and presses.
+ Step aerobics and boxing is a lot of fun. Both exercises have seen improvements and work well with the Kinect.
+ The game FINALLY recognizes my jumps! One frustration with the Wii was its inability to recognize jumps during downhill inline skating. No more, Sports Active fans!
+ Intensity is not a problem with this game. I completed medium intensity workouts and my heart rate stayed at about 70-80% of my maximum.
+ Lots of stats. You want stats, you got ‘em. This game will tell you your average heart rate, calories burned, percent completion, and will give you graphs to measure your intensity. It will even tell you how many of each exercise you’ve ever performed, ever.
+ Achievements. Nothing like increasing your gamerscore and getting in shape at the same time, am I right?

Cons:

- Motion-controlled menu interface. It is useless. Tip: Once you get your heart rate monitor connected, turn on your XBOX 360 controller as well. If you’re expecting to have a controller-less experience with EASA 2, you will be spending a lot of time inadvertently hitting the wrong options and correcting your mistakes.
- Voice recognition. I thought this would be a pretty cool addition. Yeah sure, I’d like to pause my workout simply by saying “Pause.” But try to do anything else and you’ll find out that it’s not worth it. Want to skip an exercise? “Pause.” “Skip exercise.” “Select.” (Are you sure?) “Skip exercise.” “Select.” It’s not a fast process and a little more than annoying if what you say doesn’t register the first time. Also, during my first exercise, I somehow managed to bring up the radio on two occasions (by voice prompt I’m assuming) and COULD NOT get it to go away. I had to pull out my handy controller again and hit “X” to get rid of it.
- “Show Me How” is a pain! My first workout was 42 minutes long, and I bet I managed to accidentally trigger this selection about 30 times. I’m not sure if it was a phantom voice prompt or arm movement that triggered it, but it really put a kink in my workout.
- No real-life trainers. It’s a small complaint, but I think it’s worth mentioning. In the first EASA, you learned how to perform exercises from actual human beings, which not only helped you with your form but also made you think, “Hey, if he/she can do it, so can I.” Instead, EA has replaced these trainers with generic computer renderings tirelessly performing alternating jump lunges. Were the developers too rushed to include them? Or just cheap?
- Trainer prompts and suggestions. One of the best features of the first EASA was the helpful suggestions given during your workout, telling you to focus on breathing or tighten your glutes. They were spouted often but always changed and were generally helpful. Now, they are overly repetitive and not useful. Yes, I know I should keep my pushups low, but if I go any lower, I will actually just be laying on the floor. Tip: after you’ve have one go through all of the exercises and heard all the trainer has to say, go to game settings and turn off all trainer input. You’ll be happier doing the running drills when you’re not being told to keep your back straight every 10 seconds.

Overall, EA Sports Active 2 does give you a solid, heart-pounding workout at home. But it feels as though EA made a last minute port instead of tailoring their SA franchise for the Kinect. Controls are finicky, graphics are a bit lacking, and sometimes you’ll scream at your console for once again “showing you how” to do something you already know how to do.

Verdict: If you already have one of the previous Sports…

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EA Active 2 Initial Impressions, November 16, 2010

By 

M. Owens – See all my reviews

  

There are some ways this product falls short, and others where it excels.

Pros:
-Heart rate monitoring. Your heart rate is an extremely useful tool for getting the most out of your workouts, working out safely, working out effectively, and a very good way of gauging your intensity. Beginners always have a hard time knowing whether or not they’re working out with enough intensity, or if they’re putting unnecessary stress on their heart. For those with heart conditions, I wouldn’t even consider another fitness game.

-Resistance training and weight settings. You can use resistance bands for many of the workouts used by the game, or you can change a setting so that you can use your own dumbbells (up to 30 pounds, as far as I can tell). Resistance training is an important part of any serious workout.

-9 week program. This is a great feature for beginners and those that have been out of the routine for a while. It puts you on a routine with three selectable levels of intensity, four days a week for about a half hour per day. These workouts are great. I struggled to finish the Medium setting the first time through as a former athlete who’s spent a little too much time couch gaming over the past few years and eating too much fast food after being too lazy to get back into my routine after an illness. For a while, expect these routines to take as much as an hour out of your day. Another plus here is warm-up and cool-down at the beginning and ending of each day’s routine. Other fitness tools neglect this extremely important aspect of a good workout. Where is the stretching? It’s unfortunate that good stretching wasn’t thrown into the warm-up and cool-down portions.

Cons:
-Customization. I haven’t explored this feature a great deal yet, but there doesn’t appear to be an extensive level of customization.

-Stat tracking. This is pretty much a joke. The elaborate stat tracking that was posted is essentially just you answering a roll call. Did you exercise today? Yes. Did you eat healthy? Yes. Okay. Its making sure you participated, which is great, but I want to monitor my body’s specific progress. It doesn’t even have an input (that I’ve seen), where you can input your weight each day after weighing yourself on a scale, which I find sad considering you can mark down your participation in outside activities and have it count toward your progress. Why can’t I record my weight progress, EA? Wii Fit lets you do it, and appears to be a superior tool for monitoring your results progress. If you have both, continue doing your Wii Fit Body Test daily as a supplement to EA Sports Active 2.

As I’ve said, these are initial impressions and may change. I intend to update this review as I discover new ways it excels and fails. At the end of day one, my body is feeling the too long unfamiliar feeling of a great workout.

UPDATE (11/19/10) Dropped from 4 to 2 stars.

Just completed my second workout and wow… just wow. I am about 8 feet from my TV because my living room is narrow but according to other Kinect games like Kinect Adventures and Dance Central have no problem detecting all of my movements easily. The second routine has a lot of workouts on that involve sitting on the floor, consecutively. Not only does the game force you to be standing at the beginning of each one of these to be recognized by the Kinect, but it also would not recognize anything my legs did while on my back no matter what I did. When I was supposed to be doing V crunches, I was having to kick one leg up in the air as high as I could just to get it to count a rep so I could just move on to the next workout. I tried lying sideways, straight forward, angled, closer, further away. NOTHING worked. I had to skip 2-3 workouts because of this. 8 feet should be plenty. Today, I was genuinely annoyed that I wasted an hour out of my day I could have spent getting a real workout. After this, I am really leaning toward selling it, as I don’t have the 10-12 feet this apparently requires for floor workouts.

UPDATE 2 (11/22/10) Still 2 stars.

My wife and I have both done additional workouts with EA Active 2, moving the Kinect both above and below the TV, recalibrating everything as well. This thing still will not pick anything up that goes on when you’re on the floor correctly, aside from pushups. It appears to be a result of the couch being at our backs. If your feet get near the couch, it can’t detect your feet properly anymore. Again, my couch is about ten feet from the TV; supposedly plenty. If you take even one step forward, it tells you that you are too close once you lie down and won’t track the movements anyway. No other Kinect game I’ve tried so far has had this problem.

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The best fitness game out there. Kinect may be slightly glitchy, but worth it., November 16, 2010

By 

Matthew A. Hewitt (Mount Pleasant, MI) – See all my reviews

  

= Fun: 

I preorderd this game and had a chance to pop it into the 360 and play it tonight. I own both of the previous Wii EA Sports Active games (for Wii) and enjoyed them both, but ended up falling off of the exercise wagon after a while.

I’m hoping this one can keep me motivated a bit longer.

I’m just going to go through a quick list of the Pros and Cons.

Pros:
Voice navigation through the game’s menus is pretty awesome. Being able to skip workout tutorials just by using my is pretty awesome. You can also navigate through the in-game music choices to skip tracks if you feel the need.

Syncing with EASportsActive.com is good stuff. Sometimes during my lunch break I like to check in on my fitness schedule to know when my rest days are. You’re also able to change attributes on your account like weight and have it sync back to the Xbox.

Workout tutorials are very helpful. Videos actually show you the way to hold the weights and how to perform the exercise. The trainer tells you where you should feel the burn so that helps you know if you are doing it correctly.

Kinect Sensor makes this game so much easier. One thing I hated about the Wii version was constantly pulling the nunchuck out of the leg strap and having to try to fit it back in there on the next exercise. No more fussing with that. Kinect just tracks your motion with its camera, so there is nothing to hold on to. Some exercises require weights, so the only thing you will switch back and forth between are exercises not requiring weights and exercises requiring weights…

Being able to use free weights rather than the resistance weight band. I grabbed myself a couple of 5 lb. weights and entered it into my game profile and went to town. When you set up your profile, you tell it how heavy the weights are, and it uses that information to help calculate your calorie burn. The game comes bundled with a resistance band if you don’t have any weights of your own.

This isn’t an EA Sports Active pro, more of a 360/Kinect pro. Achievements are awesome. I have a feeling the lust for every achievement point in this game will be one thing that motivates me to keep playing. Setting up your account and getting through your first workout session nets you about 30 points. I can’t imagine how tone I will be after collecting them all.

Cons:

I consider the bundled heart rate monitor both a pro and a con. It is interesting to see your rate spike when you’re really pushing it, and I can see how it would give you a more accurate calorie burn reading, but the fact that it increases the price of the game to makes it a little harsh. The rate monitor just isn’t that important to me. I haven’t tried out two player mode yet, but I don’t think the monitor is required for the exercises, just recommended, so no need to pick up a second one if the person you play with isn’t super into it. I will probably let my fiancée wear it if she wants to when we work out together because it just isn’t that important to me.

The exercise accuracy tracking with Kinect is a little sketchy. Sometimes the machine just has no idea what I am doing, especially when squatting. I’m willing to put part of the blame on myself, I have only had the game for an evening, so I am not in good enough shape to squat as low as it wants me to. I also had pajama pants on rather than my usual workout shorts. I recommend wearing shorts; I think it will help a lot. The accuracy also seems a little off when jogging in place. It really wants you to power jog and whip those arms back and forth to burn more calories. I think it uses the arm movement as a way to judge if you are actually running. Sometimes you really have to exaggerate your movement to get it to pick up that you’re actually running in place quite fast. I’m willing to give the machine the benefit of the doubt. Next time I will be wearing shorts and after a few more weeks I should be able to squat lower, so I will try to update this after that. I feel the trade off in accuracy is totally worth not having to flail around with the Wiimotes though. I am hoping now that Microsoft has sold over a million of these things they use the data gathered to release a patch that improves accuracy across the board.

Load time. It seems to take an awful lot of time to load in between the workouts. I am going to install the game to the Xbox HDD, and I think it will eliminate that problem. To be honest, I needed the extra 30 seconds of rest time tonight, but listening to the Xbox wind up like a jet engine between every workout is a pretty scary thing to witness.

I wished the game allowed you to use the voice navigation for personal music selection using music streamed over a network or mp3s that are stored on the Xbox HDD. Rocking out to my own tunes or a podcast while working out would be pretty amazing to me. There is nothing to…

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Worth the price!, June 20, 2008

By 

M. Watkins – See all my reviews

  

Highly recommended! I tried 2 other Bluetooth headsets before finding this one. Callers on the other end always had trouble hearing me on the phone because of all the background noise (I drive a semi). Also, I found the ear clip style of the other headsets uncomfortable and inconvenient. But this over-the-head style and padded earphone are very comfortable. I have not had a single call yet where the person on the other end had trouble hearing me. You also hear them extremely well thanks to the padded headphone that cups your ear and keeps out other noise. This thing works great in a noisy semi truck, so I know it would be awesome in other, quieter settings!

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Pretty good headset, May 21, 2008

I owned two of the last version of this headset and they broke very quickly. I decided to try out this new version and it is definitely better, but I’m still crossing my fingers. This time, the boom is adjustable both to the right and left, which is good. The over-the-head strap is flexible and much more comfortable. Now the bad: the blue and red lights are very hard to see in the daylight, the beep to tell you if it’s on is barely audible, and many times the other person can’t hear me at first even though the phone says a connection is made.

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Motor Trend MTBT09 Max 4x Bluetooth Wireless Headset – Black, May 18, 2008

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Amed Guardado (California) – See all my reviews

  

It is a beautiful Headset. But, it has its quirks. I love that it does last forever as described. The only thing is that when speaking the person on the other end can barely hear what you are saying. You as the user can hear loud and clear the person on the other end can barely hear you. For something that is so expensive, everyone should be able to hear you clearly. And that is not happening.

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