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 benefit is that you can incorporate exercise equipment in your workouts: an exercise bench, a fitness ball, or hand weights.
On a positive note, it really helps that you can see your own video image next to the animated Jenny, to see precisely how she does the exercise. And I do like the customization and the attention to detail. For example, I was surprised that my on-screen Jenny greeted me with phrases like "the weather's getting cold outside" (I wrote this review in the Fall).
The fatal flaw of this title, however, is how inconsistently the camera tracks movements. Worse, your workouts will be adjusted based on your "failures", so you're basically going to be penalized whenever the system doesn't detect you properly.
Ubisoft came up with a great idea here, but they just couldn't get it working. I'm not a software engineer, but my gut tells me the money they paid for a celebrity could have been better spent on more R&D, doing something like providing reflective arms straps or leg straps which could be better detected by the camera or supplementing the video information with Balance Board, Nunchuk, or Wii remote information.
From what I can tell, certain things can give you the best chance for success...
* Stand in the middle of the screen. Make sure your entire body is in the screen, and your on-screen image is about the same size as the animated Jenny's image (stand 8-10 feet away).
* Make sure the background is plain, and that your clothes contrast against the background (e.g., wear all black if you're against a white wall and bright clothes if you're against a darker wall). Clear away everything from the camera's view.
* Time your exercises to precisely match the animated Jenny's on-screen movements, not your own video image. The music is completely useless (it's just background music with a beat independent of the exercise).
* Make sure the lighting is such that your images isn't too bright (e.g. next to a sunny window) nor too dim.
* Make sure there's nothing else in the image that's moving.
...but even these were far from foolproof.
To sum up? A great idea, and if everything worked I'd be touting it as the new king of the hill. But at the end of the day the poor responsiveness makes it too frustrating to deal with. Exercise-wise, there's nothing here you can't get in the $19 My Fitness Coach. So the question you need to ask yourself is, is it worth an extra $50 for a low-end Webcam and the thrill of seeing your own image on-screen, knowing that the motion-detecting technology is frustrating and probably years away from being perfected.