Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Dear Diary,
Today began another new Kinect fitness program developed in association with The Biggest Loser trainer, Jillian Michaels. With such success behind her name, you’d think that Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure, developed by Majesco Entertainment, might be worth checking out. Let me put it mildly: it isn’t. This is, by far, the worst fitness program I have every had the displeasure of playing. In fact, it’s one of the worst Kinect titles too. There is absolutely nothing redeemable about this title and I found tonight’s workout to be one of frustration.
The program started by having me fill out my personal profile with age, weight, height, etc. much like other programs do. First of all, both the height and weight values were simply numbers. No units specified. So is it looking for lbs or kgs? Does it want inches or cm for height? I had no idea and has to assume it was asking for the metric values. Not only that, but in order to set the values using Kinect, I had to simply move my hand onto an up or down arrow and hold it as the numbers flew by. Good luck stopping on exactly the number you want. I spend way too much time trying to get the numbers to the value they needed to be. I was glad to have that part done.
From there I chose the select a full body workout. From there, the frustration continues. As all Kinect fitness programs do, the program displays an image of me on screen and can fairly accurately determine if I’m doing the correct workout. Not so with this one. Especially with the floor exercises in which there were plenty. Absolutely none of the floor drills could see me and essentially told me I did 0 of 10 correct moves. Every time. This caused my workout to last much longer than it should have because it just kept going until it thought I was doing it. Eventually it seems it gave up on me and moved on anyway. The visible area that the Kinect is watching is also quite small when doing drills such as a side lunge. Each time I did a side lunge, I would exit the Kinect’s sensor box and it would rate the movement as wrong because it couldn’t see me.
It is programs like this that I could see turning many people off of exercise completely and, if I were Jillian Michael’s, I would be ashamed to have my name attached to this garbage.
I am not looking forward to doing more sessions with this.
Friday, February 1, 2013
Dear Diary,
Well, I only came back to this program because I promised to do 3 or 4 sessions with each fitness program during the course of this Healthy Gaming project. I’m really sorry I did. Today I thought I’d try the “Adventure” mode of this program. It’s actually an interesting way to make fitness fun. If it worked.
In Adventure mode, the fitness becomes an actual game as the player jogs to run through a specific location, collecting coins along the way by outstretching arms up or sideways. This is followed by an obstacle of some kind that requires a specific fitness drill to get past: lunges, squats, etc.
During my Adventure, as mentioned above on day one, this is a terribly executed Kinect program. Since this time the game actually will *not* progress unless the drill is executed properly, I found my self doing the same motion again and again as the program told me “Come on! I know you can do it!” and the “game” not progressing at all. Eventually I managed to get it to recognize the first squat drill and continue. Until it got to another side-lunge drill. Again, since the Kinect viewing area is quite small, each side lunge exited the side of the area and the program evaluated it as wrong and wouldn’t continue.
I know I said I would do 3 or 4 days of this, but no. I gave up on it at this point. I do not care to be more frustrated with a workout and Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure shall never see the inside of my Xbox again.
I am absolutely aghast that this fitness program actually made its way through QA testing and was approved for sale. It is so broken it can only serve to give both Majesco and Jillian Michaels very bad names in Fitness titles for Kinect.
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