A workout video disguised as a video game. Good value for workout video, not much of a game.
User Rating: 7.8 | Yourself!Fitness XBOX
Someone was watching a lot of exercise videos and said, "You know, it'd be great if you could make a program that would tailor the exercises to you and be different every time." I know, because I was that person. But I wasn't the person who wrote this program. (No, it's not a game.) It's a workout video that tailors itself to you and is different (a little) every time. It gets a lot of stuff right (varied workout, flexible difficulty level, tracking), but falls short of its potential. It does a brisk but not very complex evaluation, and then tells you what it thinks you need. In my case, I'm only a little fat (perhaps 15 lbs over ideal weight) and am young and in good health. The program correctly nailed that I needed to work on cardio and then has, over the last week, given me a thorough thrashing. The workouts are workouts like you'd get in a workout video by Denise Austin. (I've done those, too, with my wife.) They aren't particularly complicated and within a few sessions you've memorized the main exercises. These exercises can be very easy or hard depending on how hard you want to work (you can keep jacking up the difficulty until you feel like you're going to die), but Maya (the virtual instructor) lets you rest between the hardest ones. You also get to give her feedback about whether the workout is hard enough. It's been getting steadily harder as I've been going, and that suits me just fine. The screen shows Maya doing the workout and then has a scrolling bar that tells you what exercise you will transition to next. That scrolling bar is THE innovation here---it makes it possible to do the workout without watching very carefully and frees your attention to think about other things (and make faces at your daughter who is tangling around under your feet). The music is just barely hearable in the default settings and that's fine---it's mostly just a drumbeat to keep you in step. Maya's voice is pleasant but quickly repetitive and she never, ever sweats. It's clearly aimed at women---girlfriend-of-the-gamer type, I guess, since you'd need your XBox to make it work. The tone is never challenging but instead very relaxed and supporting. The game has no flavor whatsoever. Really! The music is not there, the voice work is good but very flat in affect, and the animations simple. It's like styrofoam. It's totally forgettable. I love that, though. In other workout videos, you see the same distinctly human people again and again, and you start making up stories about them in your head and you start tracking the little quirks in the instructor's patter---flubbed lines, gasps, particularly grating "You go girl" stuff. Maya has none of that (although I do find myself tracking the odd weirdness, like how she sometimes passes her hand weight through her breast), and it's fantastic. I can think largely about other things while I work out, yet still get the advantages of having a not-particularly-attentive personal trainer. There are some other features (a yoga meditation garden, recipes, some tracking stuff), but I've had no motivation to explore them. This points to the real sin: lack of unlockables. I mean, if you really want to keep your gamers going, you should give them more and more improbable arenas to work out in, new clothes for your instructor, lots of new tunes, etc. etc. Encourage them to try all the different modes with cool backgrounds or badges or something! I mean, come on! Still, though, it's cool. It has great value compared to a workout video, but is clearly the work of a small team and has none of the polish of a AAA title. I'm enjoying it, but there's room for even more! 
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