EASPORTS really has cranked up the PR machine in anticipation of the November 16th release of EASPORTS Active 2. In the last few months they have announced that David Beckham and Venus Williams will be celebrity spokespeople for the product, and they have also been releasing a steady stream of promotional videos to drive player interest. The latest video, released last night on Facebook, reveals an impressive array of interesting and, perhaps more importantly, challenging looking exercises.
Image courtesy of Scott Smith via Flickr
Fitness gaming has come a long way in a very short time. We’ve advanced from games that were, for all intents and purposes, glorified exercise videos to fully interactive workouts with virtual personal trainers. With the upcoming release of the Kinect for the XBox 360 the bar is being raised even higher, and companies like EA SPORTS are fully poised to rise up to the challenge with the addition of gadgets that will actually monitor your heart rate while you’re working out and evaluate your form at the same time. Despite these advances, though, there still seems to be a somewhat unspoken belief out there that these games, while keen, are…well…
For girls.
Many guys just don’t feel that fitness games are “intense” enough for them. Mind you, if they actually tried the games in question they would probably be surprised to find out just how intense they can be, but the incentive just doesn’t seem to be there for them.
That may very well be changing soon.
Not too long ago I wrote a story about how several programmers hooked up a treadmill and a Wiimote controller to their personal computer in order to play the Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game Aion. I’ve also written several articles about how the fitness gaming industry is exploding and more and more companies are coming out with innovative new ways to help players get fit using their consoles.
I knew that game designers were going to continue to push the envelope to find the “next big” thing in the fitness gaming arena, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the step that Bigben Interactive decided to go in.
A few years ago several World of Warcraft players with way too much time on their hands decided that it would be a good idea to rig their computers to a treadmill so they could virtually “run” across Azeroth. Unfortunately the video and the page that originally linked to it have vanished into the virtual ether, but suffice it to say that the heroes of the story soon learned that they were not, in fact, nearly as fit as their digital selves.
It seems as though these days you can’t have a conversation about Massively Multi-player Online Role-Playing Games without someone asking which one is going to be the World of Warcraft killer. Personally? I happen to agree with my buddy Kevin Stallard who boldly stated that there would never be a WoW killer. Regardless of our opinion, though, people still speculate who is going to have the power to dethrone the 800 pound gorilla that Blizzard created, and many folks are wondering if the Asian inspired Aion from NCSoft has what it takes to become King of the Hill.
So what, you may be wondering, does dominance in the MMO industry have to do with a Health and Fitness blog?
You know, it’s not very often that I get the opportunity to post a picture of a rather attractive and scantily clad woman here on ShrinkGeek and still have the right to claim that my doing so is in the realm of “legitimate” reporting. Today just happens to be one of those days.
Fitness model and former World Wrestling Entertainment superstar Trish Stratus announced on Thursday that she is partnering up with Frima Studios to produce Stratusphere, an exergame that will focus on using Yoga as a “real workout.” The game will use the Wii Balance Board along with other peripherals and include video segments of Stratus encouraging the players on.
There was a lot of buzz on the floor of E3 this year after Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, and rightly so. The potential to have a game system that can track your movements so precisely that it can actually recognize who you are when you walk into the room is pretty amazing (and, admittedly, pretty creepy at the same time). While attaching a camera to a console to use in a video game is nothing new, the level of interactivity that Project Natal is promising is going to be a huge leap forward if it ever actually makes it out of development. Needless to say, this kind of tool could totally revolutionize the fitness gaming industry.
Ubisoft, however, isn’t waiting around for Microsoft to finish development of Project Natal. This Christmas they are bringing the hands-free fitness gaming concept to the Nintendo Wii.
EA SPORTS announced today that the first expansion to their hit fitness game EA SPORTS Active will be released in North America on November 17th, 2007 (just in time for the holiday season).
As much as I’m looking forward to getting my hands on this particular little expansion I have to admit that the name leaves a lot to be desired. When I first wrote about the “tropical” theme of the expansion I figured it would be something like EA SPORTS Active: Fitness In Paradise! or something along those lines. Apparently my marketing mojo isn’t as good as I thought it was because the name for the latest addition to this franchise is a descriptive but less-than-imaginative EA SPORTS Active More Workouts.
One of the games we heard about while poking around on the floor of E3 this year was NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer. Touted as an “interactive training solution focused on well-being,” this new entry into the exergame field looked interesting but did not, at the time, have a release date or distributor.
Well it appears as though Ubisoft, distributors of lifestyle enhancing games like Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout and My Healthy Cooking Coach (not to mention somewhat more traditional games like Assassin’s Creed) has decided to add yet another fitness game to their arsenal. It was announced on Tuesday that Ubisoft would be handling the distribution of NewU in all of the PAL countries except Italy, New Zealand, and Australia.
There has been no word yet as to whether or not Black Bean has found a distributor for NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer in the NTSC regions, but with the ever growing popularity of the fitness gaming market it’s only a matter of time if the game sells well in Europe.
Something interesting – According to the press release, NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer is only the first release in the “NewU Family of products.” No other details were included, but it seems as though Black Bean is committed to releasing a whole series of lifestyle enhancing games under the NewU line.
Those of you who live in the PAL regions (essentially Western Europe) should see NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer for the Nintendo Wii in stores this September.
As part of a media campaign to celebrate the release of the sequel to their popular Wii Sports game, Nintendo announced on Thursday they would be touring around the country with a portable island straight out of Wii Sports Resort.
Starting with a huge display in the middle of Times Square, the portable islands will have plenty of fruity (but non-alcoholic beverages), a steel drum band, a reflecting pool and a lounge area. Oh, yeah…You’ll also be able to try out Wii Sports Resort!
Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel
Health care is big business. Just ask President Obama. Even with our twenty-four hour news cycle being overrun with updates about the Iranian Elections or the latest round of tragic celebrity deaths, there is still almost daily coverage of the debate in Washington about the future of health care in America. While there is a great deal of conflict over what exactly the cure is for our ailing health care system, it seems as though everyone agrees that something needs to be done to reign in the rate at which health care spending continues to grow. If nothing changes the current estimates indicate that by 2017 health care expenses will top nearly $4.7 trillion dollars (nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product).
With all of that money floating around in the health care system it should not come as much of a shocker to learn that in the last 18 months exergames have generated nearly $2 Billion dollars in worldwide sales. Despite our ever-expanding waist lines (or perhaps as a direct result of them) video game fans are flocking to fitness related video games like Wii Fit and EA SPORTS Active.