EA recently announced its Wii-based home fitness game, EA SPORTS Active, will be hitting a store near you sometime next spring. EA's press materials harp on about the game "offering the promise of a better you in just 20 minutes a day" (a better me you say? impossible!) and boast of a more "Western approach" to home fitness (presumably in comparison to precursor Wii Fit), but what exactly might this entail?
It does not entail, as a good friend of mine assumed, games in which one must bale hay or dance like a prospector (although her demonstrations of probable gameplay made it seem like Dance Dance Old Timey Prospector would, indeed, be awesome and should be made into a game immediately.) Rather, it appears to entail a greater emphasis on cardiovascular and strength training exercises, as opposed to the balance and coordination exercises that dominated Wii Fit. To this end, SPORTS Active will be compatible with the Wii Balance Board, but will not require its use. Instead, the game comes bundled with a resistance band for strength training and a leg strap into which you tuck your nunchuck to track your lower body movement for running and squats -- a stunning innovation, in my opinion, over the "put the Wiimote in your pocket" technology employed in the running portions of Wii Fit.
The real innovation, I think, is SPORTS Active's multiplayer mode, something only available on one exercise in Wii Fit. One of the most appealing aspects of any Wii game is making *someone else* gesture, lunge and thrust about wildly. So, yeah, looking forward to it.
Want a sneak peek? You can check out a trailer for the game here.
[image from IGN]
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