Posts Tagged ‘Xbox 360’
2 Days with EA Sports Active 2 Kinect
November 20th, 2010 • 1 comment
Tags: 360, EA Sports Active 2, fitness, Kinect, Xbox 360
EA Sports Active 2 is the most ambitious Kinect workout title. In addition to the trainer-led workouts of the Wii original, the new version adds a heart rate monitor and a social fitness tracking website. I recently picked up a copy, and have found it mostly delivers on its promises albeit with some noticeable shortcomings.
The initial setup of the game is a bit lengthy. You’ll be learning how to pair the heart rate monitor with the Xbox 360 and setting up your profile and avatar before you can even begin your workout. The setup is easy enough, but it is time-consuming. I completed this setup and launched directly into the 9-week program which looked like the meat of the experience.
This assumption is most likely true although selecting it resulted in my trainer (also a Devon) proceeding to kick my ass all over my own living room… all at medium intensity! I’m certainly not in terrific shape, but I’m not in bad shape either. I have been known to ride a bike; I walk a good bit every day at my job; and I’m mindful of my diet. The game didn’t really seem to care.
I was wishing the game had given me a bit more guidance before turning me loose to figure things out on my own. For the most part, it’s is very good at handholding. For example, each new exercise is introduced with a helpful tutorial video. However, in the case of where to begin once my character had been created, the game fell a bit short.
I ended up quitting that program in favor of the 3-week cardio program which is very satisfying at the medium intensity. Players might want to start with individual workouts and build up to one of the programs. I would have loved for the game to assess my fitness level and choose a program automatically based on that assessment rather than having to blindly stumble through the process myself.
As of this writing, I have completed two workouts in my own program, buddied up with my wife for a workout in her easy-intensity cardio program, and completed most of a one-off workout — the reason for that not being completed are detailed a bit later. The workouts consist mostly of typical exercises like push-ups and squats with the occasional game-like activity peppered in for variety.
Before Active 2, I had never worked out with a trainer. I found the direction and encouragement the virtual trainer provides very satisfying. If you’re having trouble properly completing an exercise, the trainer will try to tell you what you’re doing wrong. Start struggling near the end of a set of repetitions, and the trainer will count out the final reps. The trainer even appears on-screen at the beginning and end of your workouts to lead you in warm-up and cool-down activities.
Although the trainer is great, he sometimes can’t tell you what you’re doing wrong. My first ever workout was never completed. I was on exercise 15 of 22 in a 20 minute workout. The exercise was V Crunches — my first seated exercise. You typically play by mirroring your avatar. So, I tried to turn my body the same way my avatar did. He was angled about 45 degrees from the screen. I started doing my crunches and noticed my movements were not registering properly.
I found I could turn slightly more toward the screen at the extension in the exercise and the game would recognize my movement. Then, I could turn back to have it recognize the contraction. Unfortunately, this made the exercise exponentially more difficult. I had to quit which resulted in none of my exercises up to that point in the workout being counted. It was a bummer to say the least.
I have since learned that floor exercises are always done at a 90 degree angle to the screen. This brings me to another point. Remember the hullabaloo about Kinect space requirements? EA Sports Active 2 turns that up to 11. I had already cleared about 10-12 feet of play area in my living room and found I needed about 3 feet more for Kinect to properly register the floor exercises. They would still work before, but I had a persistent “Move back from the TV” message displayed on-screen.
For all the depth of the stat tracking and information presented here, it left me wanting more. It takes very basic nutritional information and uses this to fill your “gauge” which is a composite score based on your exercise and nutrition for the day, but it never really makes any specific recommendations for nutrition based on this information.
The same goes for other exercises done outside of the game. They can be recorded using the journal, but they don’t count toward total calories burned. Once this information is composited into your gauge which is scored out of 100, it seems to never be liberated from it again.
Active 2′s singular social feature, Groups, is very superficial. You can see a list of all members of your group in a table with seven statistics to compare to your own. I can click the name of a group member to see a bit more detail, but that’s it. It very much seems like an afterthought.
Perhaps the biggest downfall in the game is with its interface. It is very poorly designed for the Kinect. You will find yourself navigating multiple levels of menus trying to palm tiny menu selections and waiting quite a while for the next menu to load. It appears as though the menu was designed for a controller, but, quite frankly, it’s a bit of a pain to keep grabbing a controller to navigate and then find a good place for it while I’m working out. I would much prefer the interface itself not be part of the workout.
Minor complaints aside, EA Sports Active is so far proving to be a great fitness tool. For someone who knows little about fitness but still puts a value on it, it’s nice to have guidance about what I need to be doing in an exercise routine. The workouts are fun. Most importantly, I now lie in bed typing out this review and, before I started, my fingers were the only part of me not sore and burning. That’s good, right?
Gaming’s underground: an indie games primer
February 16th, 2009 •
Tags: games, Gaming, independent games, indie games, Xbox 360, Xbox Community Games
Like most commercial artforms, video games have a vibrant community that exists outside the commercial realm. People are making games that are less influenced by the marketability of the graphics, the concept, and the gameplay conventions—and in many cases they are not influenced at all by these factors. This gives developers and artists a blank canvas to create games that you could never find on the shelf at GameStop.
For years, indie gaming has been primarily a PC affair. Console development has had too many barriers for small-time developers to be able to even consider as a viable platform. Of course, there have always been the stories of the game developed by the guy in his mom’s basement that was discovered by someone and turned into a full-fledged console release, but that is the exception not the rule. In the past year, this has started to change slowly. Microsoft has released its development kit and launched Community Games on Xbox Live which is a platform for indie developers to release and sell their creations. The iPhone has also offered a successful and accessible platform for indie developers. Most indie games are still on the PC, but the industry has seen the value in indie games and is making inroads to having them on a multitude of platforms.
GemCraft is a deep tower defense game built in Flash and playable in the browser
Possibly the most popular platform of all for indie gaming is the web thanks to the Flash browser plugin. There are hundreds of sites that focus solely on providing a Flash gaming playground with titles spanning every genre you can imagine. Because of the ubiquity of Flash, these games are accessible to almost anyone with a computer of any kind. They reach levels of sophistication that are very close to that of applications native to a particular hardware platform and offer something for casual and hardcore gamers alike.
Within indie games are represented a number of popular genres of old that no longer receive exposure in the mainstream. There are still die-hard fans of the point-and-click adventure genre and the shoot ‘em up genre, but there aren’t enough of them to justify big-budget boxed releases outside the oddball title once every year or two. The indie scene has stepped in to support fans of these genres, and developers release a steady stream of these titles all the time.
Counterstrike started life as a Half-life mod
Indie games also invent new genres that often make their way into the mainstream. Popular PC shooter Counterstrike began its life as a freely-distributed game mod for the original Half-life. A loose genre that has gained popularity as of late is the “arthouse game.” This genre label doesn’t really describe a particular set of gameplay conventions as many do but instead refers to an underlying philosophy present throughout games in the genre to a greater or lesser extent. This genre bending and stretching often even stretches the definition of a “game” to encompass interactive works of art (drawing the ire of some).
Speaking of game mods, they too are a major part of the indie gaming community. Modern PC games often ship with sets of tools that allow players to more easily modify and extend the experience of the original release. Even before these toolsets were common, users were still known to hack together modifications of popular games. These mods can be as simple as a new map or weapon or as complex as a completely new game with entirely different sounds, weapons, characters, and levels. Modders have even developed completely different genres of games on top of existing ones.
By nature of their being not as commercially viable as big titles on the console, they are also less visible. So, where would you go if you wanted to find some cool indie games? Try these sites:
Bytejacker- Bytejacker is a twice weekly video podcast that focuses on downloadable games in general. Of course, the WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade titles profiled are still big—too big in most cases to be classified as “indie,” but the show also covers indie PC games and iPhone games. It is currently one of my favorite podcasts and is certainly a fantastic source for indie goodness.
Indiegames.com Blog- This blog covers the hottest releases in the PC indie scene. You’ll often get video footage along with the descriptions to further entice you.
The Independent Gaming Source- Indie PC games are also the focus of this long-running blog. Subscribe to this feed and you will surely find a plethora of awesome games you would otherwise have overlooked.
Game Tunnel- Accessibility to developers is a double edged sword. In the indie scene, you will find some gems packed full of originality. You’re also going to find a lot of crap. If reviews of PC indie games are what you’re after, this is your place.
Slide To Play- My current favorite iPhone games review site. Sure, the iPhone is starting to get noticed by major developers, but it is still a largely independent playground.
Kongregate- This is the killer platform for Flash games. Kongregate hosts a ton of games and has site-wide acheivements ala Xbox 360. Completing an achievement in a game that supports them (many do) will add to your site-wide score. You can also complete certain acheivements to earn cards for use in Kongregate’s Flash-based collectible card game. The site also enables you to chat with other players while playing. I’m raddevon on the site so, if you join, look me up!
Newgrounds- You might call Newgrounds the birthplace of Castle Crashers since the game’s creators not only got their start posting games on the site; Tom Fulp himself actually started the site! The site is the original home of Alien Hominid which eventually became a modestly successful console game on multiple platforms including the latest version on XBLA. The success of that game paved the way for the insanely fun XBLA title Castle Crashers. The site hosts all types of Flash content, but a major chunk of its content is in the games section.
Mod DB- If you own any of the popular PC games released in the past 10 years, there are probably at least one or two mods you could download and install for free to give you a fresh gaming experience. Mod DB currently indexes almost 5,000 PC game mods which can be searched and sorted by the game they modify, the release status, the genre, the theme, and whether they are single or multi-player.
If you find yourself bored with a seemingly endless cavalcade of cookie-cutter AAA titles, dig a little deeper into the indie games scene. You’ll find greater variety and incredible innovation in almost every aspect of the games from story to visuals to gameplay. There are also indie developers working hard to refine more mainstream gaming tropes to levels not pursued in the mainstream. The indie scene can truly provide something for every gamer.
This is the joystick dreams are made of
January 27th, 2009 • 2 comments
Tags: Hori, Joystick, video games, Xbox 360
I have owned a couple of Hori joysticks in the past (back in the PSOne days). They are beasts. You won’t break them; they break you. They are the most fantastic console joysticks I have ever used. They laugh at kryptonite and eat Hattori Hanzo katanas for breakfast. This new joystick for the Xbox 360 looks to have the same build quality as those old Hori sticks I remember fondly, but it also has some style. Forget MadCatzzzzzzzz. This is the joystick for your 360 fighting enjoyment. Thanks to Kotaku for pointing this one out.
Badass 360 Arcade Stick, Made From The Bones Of Real Arcade Sticks