Your Shape
- Personalized to You – Your unique plan is based on the results of your fitness test, combined with your personal fitness goals. This plan will mix the right level of intensity with exercises focused on achieving your goal.
- You’ll Always Do the Exercises Correctly – The camera projects your image onto the TV screen so you can see yourself exercising next to Jenny.
- Exercise Controller-Free – The camera sees you, so it works without requiring any additional hardware (such as Wiimotes, nunchucks, and balance boards), leaving your hands free to focus on the exercises.
- Exercise That’s Fun and Motivational – not only is Jenny your in-game workout buddy, but you can choose from 6 background colors, 100 motivating animations, and more than 75 music tracks.
- More Exercises Than Any Other Game – Your Shape includes close to 500 exercises – which means that your routine is always focused on meeting your goals.
Developed in collaboration with fitness experts Your Shape personalizes a fitness program to your body type goals and schedule. The game comes with a motion-tracking camera in the package. Plug the camera into your Wii and you’re ready to go! The camera scans your body so your every move can be detected and guided. Jenny McCarthy is your in-game workout buddy–she will motivate inspire and guide you as you work to reach your goals while keeping things fun (and funny)along the way. Since the game
List Price: $ 29.99
Price: $ 7.99
Awesome game but very picky,
This is definitely the most incredible workout on the Wii to date. To provide context, I am in average to pretty good shape. I run 3 miles in about 11 minutes a mile and can handle a good 45 minute workout pretty well. I am totally in love with this game. My Wii is now a great workout machine with EA Sports Active and Your Shape. Some things to consider:
1) Space – The game’s body recognition is very picky. You do need to keep as much of your body as you can on the screen at all time. They suggest 8 to 10 feet between you and the camera. They are being very literal. I am 6 feet from the camera and definitely have some failures because my arms and my legs sometimes go outside the screen.
2) Light – The room needs to be well lit. Shadows in the workout space will confuse the camera when they cover you.
3) Tempo is important – Part of the game’s finickiness is that you have to be in sync with the Jenny avatar. Falling behind and being off from the tempo will bring the annoying “Follow Me” arrows. You will have to keep your intensity up the whole time.
4) There is a learning curve – It will take a few workouts to get used to the way the camera is recognizing you. Expect your first few workouts to “score” lower as you adjust. Thankfully, you are not forced into bad form to make the camera recognize you, but you will have to make some minor modifications.
5) No cheating allowed – The camera never gets tired, and expects you not to get tired as well. If you get tired and part of your body starts to slow down, it will ding you for it.
6) The camera is picky – yes, the camera is picky and expects precision
7) You are going to get dinged – this is a complex technology, and you and the camera will disagree. Just expect it. It will ding you sometimes when it shouldn’t.
Definite pluses:
1) Keeps you honest – see items 3 and 5 above.
2) Using your equipment – Being able to use hand weights and a step are awesome, and definitely contribute to the intensity of the workout.
3) Constant motion – one problem I had with EA Sports Active (I have since figured out how to do compound movements with it) is the stillness. You have to be moving only the part of the body that it is expecting. Gold’s Gym boxing game has the opposite problem. You can pretty much jab the whole game and it still registers those as the punches it expects. This game never stops moving. Curls and presses are done with plies (sp?), kicks are done with squats and up/back movement. You do not stop moving so the cardio intensity stays up.
This is an awesome workout, and it will have you dripping after 30 minutes. The camera is finicky. You will be adjusting the camera and yourself for the first few workouts.
To Summarize: If you can be patient, have a well lit room, and a good amount of space you will be rewarded with an incredible challenging workout.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Deja vu all over again,
I’ve been waiting for this program for months. I’ve become a Wii exercise junkie. Just about everyday I work out with “My Fitness Coach”, “Wii Fit Plus”, and “More EA active” (I did workout with the originals but I recently upgraded). So when I found out that there was going to be a fitness program that utilized a camera to measure your proficiency, well I was thinking Flying cars just might not be that far behind. I knew it was going to be good – I mean after all, everyone learned a lesson from “Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2009″ . . . Right . . .
Well, I got the program on release date and worked with it for about 2 hours (Set up and working out). The set up is easy. I was afraid the camera was going to utilize the motion sensor plug spot on my Wii. But no, the camera connects to the USB slot, so there’s no need to be switching cables every-time I work with Your Shape. The profile set up is easy enough and of course you have to take a fitness test that gets graded. For some reason the program said I was doing my jumping jacks incorrectly, so my final fitness test grade was a B.
After the test you go into creating your workout schedule. Be careful here because I thought I was just checking out what they call “Extra Challenges”, but instead ended up starting (and doing) a 30 minute yoga workout.
Now the trouble really starts.
Apparently the Your Shape people thought the annoying feedback chatter in EA Active is charming because I was getting a continuous string of peppy encouragement. At one time, during the corpse poss in yoga, there was nonsensical chatter like “You can do it”, or “feel them muscles stretch”or “do you feel the burn”. I searched the menus for ways to turn off chatter but the best I could do is lower the voice. The yoga section was still pretty good, although in 30 minutes we only used about 8 moves. And BTW, they continued the same mistake in “My Fitness coach” where the trainer has you going through a seriers of yoga moves, about 4 times in a row, but unfortunately she only verbalizes the moves the first time. And then there were the workouts. If you have “My Fitness coach”, then you already have this game. The only difference is “Your Shape” uses the camera. I spent a good deal of time requesting that my workouts center on my core and when my first “Your Shape” work out started it was just about the same workout I did this morning with My Fitness Coach (as a side not “My Fitness coach” used to be called “Your Self Fitness”). And BTW, there were no real core exercises in my so called focused workout.
Today, I worked out with the program for about 90 minutes. And as I suspected, they took away the workout options that you have with “My Fitness Coach”. In “MFC” you can pick the workout but here it is scheduled. As I stated earlier you can change the focus of the workout-but selecting an AB focus didn’t seem to have any effect. Another thing they took away was the ability to pick the type of music you want to hear. The music is okay for Your Shape but I thought MFC did a superior job with the music selection plus you can pick the style you like. Still, I had no real problem with the music with Your Shape.
As far as the camera. The so called center piece of this game, well I was disppointed. As I stated earlier the game did no recognize my arm movements in the Fitness test. It turns out that was a fairly common occurance with some of the other exercises. Additionally there is a slight time lag between when you do the movements and when they appear on screen. And please wear light colored clothing, otherwise you won’t really register on the TV screen. I really did not expect stellar video quality on a 70 dollar game. But it is serviceable as far as the game but the movement recognition has me concerned.
If you have “My Fitness Coach” or “Your self Fitness”, don’t bother getting “Your Shape”. If you don’t have one of those programs, wait until “Your Shape” comes down in price. Your Shape by itself is okay but considering it is really a watered down version of its two prior versions, it is hard to recommend the game.
Two stars because it will work you out, and the camera is a neat idea, but the other versions out there are better.
I had to edit my first review – I wrote this very late and was too tired to check out the far too many mistakes.
Was this review helpful to you?
|A great idea but poor motion tracking makes it too frustrating for prime time,
Like others, I really, really wanted this one to work. This was a fitness game that, done properly, could have revolutionized the whole genre. At the end of the day though, Ubisoft bit off a little more than it could chew technologically. The result is a game which is nothing short of amazing when you can get it to work properly (about 35% of the time), and just plain infuriating when you can’t (the other 65%).
Of course, what sets this title apart from the others is the inclusion of an “Innovative Motion Tracking Camera”. It turns out this is just an ordinary USB Webcam. I was disappointed that this wasn’t going to be a Project Natal-like advancement in Wii gaming; on the other hand, I was happy to get a “free” Webcam I could use for my laptop.
Setup is a snap. You plug the camera into a USB port on the back of your Wii. After a system update, the first thing you see is Jenny McCarthy giving a list of advice for how to maximize performance of your camera.
The video version of Jenny is then replaced with a slightly creepy animated version (with way too much computerized eye shadow on). An annoyingly frenetic, peppy cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” plays over and over and over and over again.
Setting up your profile:
You start by setting up your profile. As with as other games in the genre, you type your name and an optional password, choose your unit of measurement, enter your gender and year of birth, and enter your height and weight. You still have to enter your weight by hand (I would have liked to see some balance board support).
The game will turn on your camera and you’ll see yourself on the TV screen. From here, the system will “scan” your body and show an outline of your body. Sounds amazing at first, but then I realized that the outline of my body was just based on the height and weight I entered. So the purpose of the “body scan” is just to make sure you’re standing in the right place.
You select a part of your body you want to focus on: shoulders, arms, back, chest, glutes, or legs. For each of these, you can choose whether you want to burn, tone, and/or build strength. Your workout routine will be customized based on what you enter.
The Fitness Evaluation
The next step is taking you through an “evaluation”. Jenny will first ask you your current cardio level (sedentary, moderate, or active), ask you how you’re feeling, and then send you through some typical exercises of the type you’d do in your daily workouts.
This is where you start to see both the best and the worst of this game.
In each exercise, the on-screen animated Jenny is juxtaposed with your video image, so the two of you will literally make the same movements at the same time. Plus, every exercise has an optional tutorial where you can learn how to do it.
The first exercise was a warm up march. The first time I did it, it did a fairly amazing job at detecting my precise movements. For example, if I stopped moving my arms but not my legs, Jenny would yell at me to start moving my arms. Pretty cool.
The next exercise was jumping jacks. This was a disaster. The system failed to properly detect my arm movements at all. I tried everything possible to get this working: trying on different colored outfits, exaggerating my movements, adjusting speed and timing, standing in different places, and changing the lighting in the room. Nothing seemed to help–Jenny would yell at me to do it right, and my on-screen score would plummet. Not very encouraging.
The next few exercises were lateral raises, squats, plies with shoulder presses, and cool-down stretching exercises. They were hit or miss as far as my movements being detected. Whenever it worked, it was amazing. But unfortunately, it missed a lot more than it hit.
At the end of your “evaluation” the system will then give you a letter grade (lower than it should be due to the poor motion detection) and customize your workout routine based on your results and all the information you provided. It’ll recommend a fitness calendar with preprogrammed workouts for the week, which you can customize.
Workouts
From there, you just start up the Wii every day you’re scheduled to exercise and click “Workout” to go to your prescribed workout session.
As other reviewers have said, from a pure exercise point of view, this title is really no different from Ubisoft’s previous title My Fitness Coach. The exercises are “old school” calisthenics moves with names like “double heel jacks” to “turn steps” to “grapevines”. The package touts that it has “over 400 exercises”, but the truth is there are just 400 variations of jumping, swinging your arms, moving your feet, and stretching. Not that there’s anything wrong with that–it’s a very complete set of routines. An added…
Read more
Was this review helpful to you?
|