Working out with Fitness and Exercise games on the Sony Playstation 3

EA Sports Active has long been the king of the hill of fitness games for the Wii, along with its sequel EA Sports Active: More Workouts. But with the advent of the Playstation Move, EA had a decision to make. Should it continue to support the Wii and possibly cede the title of “best fitness game” for the PS3 to another game publisher? Or should it invest a ton of money into making the game work with the radically different Move controller?

EA Sports ended up doing something rather clever with EA Sports Active 2. It created its own controllers. Specifically, you have an arm controller to detect arm motions, a leg controller you strap onto your thigh, and a heart rate monitor that provides you with constant on-screen feedback of your pulse. So instead of awkwardly forcing you to hold a controller in your hand, now you can have full range of motion, grabbing onto the included resistance band (which is much less flimsy than the original Wii version) or even using free weights in your exercises.

One thing I really love about the new EA Sports Active is the innovation it put into the activities. There are over 70 to choose from, ranging from basic exercises to sporting events. As in the original version, most sporting events basically consist of you doing repetitions of exercise movements that approximate the movement that your on-screen character does. What I really like about EA Sports Active 2 is that they’ve incorporated much more interactivity and “video gaming elements” into the activities. For example, in the skateboarding and mountain biking activities, you need to leap at just the right moment to avoid obstacles. In the Basketball event, a cursor will move over the basket, and you need to time your release of the ball correctly to score.

There’s a new 9-week exercise regimen that you can follow. It’s not just a random assortment of exercises each day, it was clearly put together by a real fitness expert. Each day, you work progressively on different fitness goals. There’s a good variety of activities to keep the workouts interesting.

Another great improvement is the ability to work out with (and compete against) someone else, if you purchase a second set of controllers. There’s something about competition that makes exercise go by so much faster. If your Wii is connected to the Internet, you can also challenge your friends (or complete strangers) online or join an online workout group.

If there’s a gripe I have about EA Sports Active 2, it’s that it uses the same kind of “cartoony” graphics that you see on the Wii version. I’ve long hoped that EA Sports would start to incorporate more of the increasingly realistic graphics of its sports titles like Madden NFL into its fitness game, but it looks like that’s still some time away.

Overall, I’d say that EA Sports has made a very smooth transition to the PS3. Ironically, it doesn’t use the Move at all, but ends up providing a much stronger workout than if it did. For serious fitness on the PS3, this is a must-have.

If you have a Wii, read the updated Review of EA Sports Active 2 for the Wii!

Rating:
5 of 5

A lot of Playstation 3 owners have been waiting a long time for Dance Dance Revolution to make it to the PS3. Four long years later, it’s finally arrived. Was it worth the wait?

The first thing I noticed when I opened my DDR box was a brand new, sleek black dance pad. it definitely looks a lot “cooler” than the old white dance pads on the Wii and the PS3. The pad features the normal four directional arrows, as well as the Playstation X, square, triangle, and circle on the four corners. Installation is a snap, of course–just plug it into an available USB port and you’re all set.

The options on DDR should be familiar to anyone who’s played it on the PS2 or the Wii. You have an enthusiastic man’s voice shouting out the options as you select them.

1. In “Free Dance” mode where you can just dive into dancing. You select te number of players (single player or multiplayer) and then you can choose any song at one of four difficulty levels (beginner, basic, difficult, expert).
2. “Club Mode” is where you basically have to proceed thorugh different levels of difficulty to win the game. As with all the DDR games, this is a good way to learn the game and to gradually build skills. unfortunately, the developers decided to put in things which seem more like gimmicks than anything else. There are features like “TRICKS” which will suddenly change the difficulty level in the middle of a song. As you finish songs in other “clubs”, you can move them to your own “club”. Honestly, this section seemed much more confusing than it should have been, and the confusing and poorly written explanation of “How to Play” at the beginning only made things worse. Konami should have stuck with keeping this simple. I didn’t even bother.
3. “Dance Off” mode is where up to four players can take turns dancing. There’s something called a “combo roulette” which does things like speed up the dancing, shift the top arrows around, make the arrows bigger. But what it ends up doing is make the competition confusing and frustrating. Seems like another situation where they tried to innovate, but ended up causing more of a mess.
4. There’s been a lot of talk about how the new Dance Dance Revolution makes use of the Playstation Move controller. Turns out there’s only one menu option in which you can use them: “Move & Step”, which is basically “Free Play Mode” that uses the Move Controllers. So you can’t use the Move Controllers in Club Mode or Dance Off Mode. To start, you need to adjust your position so that you and your mat are in the middle of the screen–and you need to stay in that position throughout the song. I thought that maybe like Just Dance, the game might at least featured some hand movements that looked like real dancing. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, there are four new kinds of arrows (pointing diagonally to each of the four corners of the screen) added to the mix. To get points, you need to swipe your hand to that corner when you see the arrow. The controls are precise, of course, and you do see a visual “swoosh” when you move your hands in the right direction. For some inexplicable reason, when using Playstation Move controllers, not only does XMB navigation not work, the “X” button on the Move controllers doesn’t even work. So you’re in an awkward position where you’re holding two Move controllers, but when you need to select a menu option or even just move to the next screen, you need to drop the Move controllers, pick up your Dualshock controller, make your selection, and then pick up the controllers again. It’s a rather sloppy piece of programming on Konami’s part.
5. The remaining modes are “How to Play” (for anyone who doesn’t know how to play DDR yet), “Training Mode” (which lets you break down any song at any difficulty to practice it–again, no Move support), “Music Store” (which lets you access DLC), “Workout Profile” (which tells you the number of calories burned), “Records” (which displays the high scores for each song on your system for Free Play Move and Move & Step), “Video Manager” (which lets you export videos to YouTube and Facebook) and “Options”

The graphics are much better quality than on the Wii or the PS2, of course. When you select the songs you see a high-resolution image of the song’s album cover. For the most part, the graphics are crisp and the colors bright. During the dance numbers, you’ll see a video of yourself, taken with the Playstation Eye, in the background (sometimes clear, sometimes stylized with a solid color). I first found this a pretty cool feature, but sometimes the stylized images were so garing and distracting I just had to turn the camera off.

The playlist, as usual, is a combination of licensed tracks and Konami’s in-house music composers.

• According to You (Orianthi)
• Animal (Ke$ha)
• Bad Romance (Lady Gaga)
• Battlefield (Jordin Sparks)
• Celebration (Kool and the Gang)
• crushcrushcrush (Paramore)
• Dancing in the Street (Martha and the Vandellas)
• Hey, Soul Sister (Train)
• I Got You (Leona Lewis)
• I’m Yours (Jason Mraz)
• Love Like This (Natasha Bedingfield)
• Love Shack (The B-52s)
• Mission (Everything But the Girl)
• My Life Would Suck Without You (Kelly Clarkson)
• Need You Now (Lady Antebellum)
• Plastic Beach (Gorillaz feat. Mick Jones and Paul Simonon)
• Rio (Duran Duran)
• So Fine (Sean Paul)
• Venus (Bananarama)
• We Are Family (Sister Sledge)
• dreaming can make a wish come true (jim and NRG Factory feat. Anna Kaelin)
• In the Zone (UI, NPD3 style) and KIDD KAZMEO
• Let’s Get Away (NAOKI fear. Brenda Burch)
• MAGIC PARADE (Lea Drop feat. Katie Dellenbach)
• One Sided Love (D-crew with Melissa Petty)
• Private Eye (atomsoak ft. cerol)
• Rescue Me (NAOKI feat. fracus)
• Rhythms Inside (DKC Crew)
• The Island Song (TAG feat. Eric Anthony)
• TIME (NM feat. Aleisha G)

There are a number of aggravating annoyances. You can’t pause when you’re in the middle of a song. No buttons will work, and even if you hit the PS button, the song will keep on going. So if you get a phone call in the middle of a song, you just have to let it play all the way through.

You have the ability to record your performance in Free Play Mode, Dance Off and Move & Step. I can see the usefulness of recording songs with a dance game like Singstar Dance where you’re dancing to “real moves”. But here, you’re just hopping up and down and waving your arms randomly. Something tells me that this isn’t the sort of thing most people will be sharing on their Facebook page.

In all honesty, I think this summarizes DDR’s main weakness. DDR was the king of the hill of motion gaming since it first launched as an arcade game in 1998. But the world has moved on. Now that you can dance “real dance moves”, stepping on arrows seems a bit passé.

Don’t get me wrong, die-hard DDR fans will love this new game, the improved graphics, and the new music tracks. It’s still one of the better workouts you can get, especially when you practice over and over again to nail a difficult song. And of course, no other game can match it in terms of precision. But everyone else will probably find more satisfaction in newer games like Singstar Dance for the PS3, Just Dance 2 for the Wii, and Kinect Dance for the Xbox where they can not just pattern match but actually learn real dance steps. In that regard, DDR seems almost antiquated.

Overall, I’ll give it a rating of three of five stars. Executed well enough, but there’s really nothing very noteworthy nor innovative about it. It’s basically the same as it was in 1998–the “improvements” the developers tried to make (including use of the Move controllers) seem for the most part forced and contrived, as if they knew they had to be innovative, but knew that there’s just not that much more that can be done to stretch a 12-year old platform.

That said, I’d say it’s still a good purchase if you’ve never owned DDR before, and especially if you have kids in the house whose gym classes offer DDR (it’s a great way to get kids to not only get some exercise, but also give them some bragging rights at school after they’ve practiced at home).

Rating:
3 of 5

Rating:
5 of 5

Get Fit With Mel B is the first “pure fitness game” to come out for the Playstation Move. If the screens for Get Fit with Mel B look familiar, there’s a good reason. The game was developed by a company called Lightning Fish, which also happened to develop a game for the Wii called “New U Fitness” in the UK, where it was pretty well received.

In what turned out to be a disastrous move, the game was re-released in the United States by Ubisoft. In their wisdom, they decided to rename the game “My Fitness Coach 2″. The game had nothing to do with the original “My Fitness Coach” (a groundbreaking game developed by Respondesign), but evidently the Ubisoft marketing folks wanted to cash in on the brand name. The results were almost as bad as “New Coke” vs “Old Coke”. People who loved the first My Fitness Coach were up in arms that the “sequel” was nothing like the original. Reviews on Amazon were abysmal.

Marketing department snafu notwithstanding, New U Fitness was not as bad as the reviews would indicate. It had a snazzy, three-dimensional opening menu, and you could choose on-screen instructors to lead you through a variety of basic calisthenics exercises (sit-ups, lunges, etc.). You could choose either individual exercises or have the system prepare a daily workout that combined different exercises over time based on your fitness goals. It had the typical bells and whistles of a Wii workout game such as allowing you to change your background scenery.

It suffered from the two things that most Wii games suffer from: lower resolution graphics, and spotty motion controls. But if you were committed to to working out, it was a decent title which was more or less an exercise DVD which let you “mix and match” exercises, nothing more and nothing less. Sort of like eating your vegetables, it wasn’t “fun”, but it did the job.

My initial impression of Get Fit with Mel B is pretty much the same. The premise of the game is more or less identical to My Fitness Coach 2 and in fact, so are the menu options.

The opening menu options are:

Today’s Workout: When you set up your profile, you can identify up to two fitness goals falling under the categories of General Health (weight loss, detox, lower cholesterol), Lifestyle (e.g. “Destress”), Special Occasions (e.g., new mom/dad, getting ready for the holidays), Sports and Activity training, and working on specific parts of your body. The system will automatically put together a daily 30-minute regimen of exercises that will target these goals.

Choose Workout: Here, you can drill down to the specific exercises that you want. Exercises are broken into two categories: Fitness and Aerobics. Fitness exercises include things like crunches, squats, lunges, etc. You typically do them in reps of 10-20 before going onto the next exercise. Aerobics is where this title is at its best. You can choose from a series of dance moves, boxing moves, or cardio moves. There’s also a “custom workout” option which lets you put together your own string of exercises (selecting exercises and defining the number of reps for each), a “practice” option which lets you practice certain exercises as many times as you like (anywhere from 4 to 96 reps), and a neat “challenges” option where you’re pushed to complete a series of themed exercises (dance exercises, abs exercises, leg exercises, boxing exercises, and cardio exercises) within a certain amount of time.

Your Progress: This section allows you to track your workout progress. One thing the Wii has that the PS3 doesn’t is a balance board which will automatically chart your weight. So it’s time to dust off that bathroom scale. Nutrition: I never quite understood the concept of having recipes on a video game. I get that they want to provide a “holistic workout regimen” that involves proper diet, but on the other hand, not many people have their TVs set up in their kitchen or a printer hooked up to their video game console.

Here’s a video of me doing the “cardio” exercises under the “Challenge” section.

I look gargantuan compared to Mel B because of two things. First, the furthest I could get my Playstation Move camera was about 5 feet away. Secondly, because I’m a little bashful–the last thing I need is to be recognized on the street and told how bad my form was on the video!

After seeing myself on TV, I wonder if I could have been the sixth Spice Girl: “Freakishly Huge Headless Spice”.

There were a couple things I really liked about Get Fit with Mel B:

1. The game makes excellent use of video. You first get a hint of this when you seeing a video image of yourself under “Your Progress” in the opening menu options. After you select your scenery and start your exericses you see two exercise mats, one with a video image of Mel B (it’s really her, not a creepy cartoon rendering), and the other with–you! As Mel B does the exercises, you can match her movements and timing exactly, step by step, arm movement by arm movement. It’s a vast improvement over the “do the mirror image of my movements” inherent in Wii exercise games.
2. The scenery is breathtaking. Granted, when compared to other PS3 games it’s probably not that impressive, and it’s really just a backdrop (there’s no interaction with the scenery), but for someone used to choosing background scenery on a low-resolution Wii, I was impressed. The first scene I chose was the “City Apartment”, which was a window overlooking a city skyline. You can also choose from a park, a dock (in the Maldives, no less), a poolside, a forest meadow, and a luxury yacht.
3. The array of individual exercises is impressive. There are 22 basic fitness exercises, but 15 dance exercises, 20 boxing exercises, 14 cardio exercises, and 14 advanced cardio exercises. Put them together in different orders with different amounts of reps, and you’ll have a pretty good variety of workouts.
4. You can choose to work out using your own equipment, including an aerobics step, a fitball, a resistance band, wrist weights, and ankle weights.
5. I like little details they put in. When it’s time for a water break, Mel B takes out a bottle of water and drinks it with you. The game is intelligent enough to give different “fitness goals” based on your profile information (e.g. whether you’re male or female). And so on.

Having said that, there were a number of things I found annoying about the game:

1. While other games say that you need to be at least 8 feet from the camera, most of the time you can get away with being 5-6 feet away. Not so with this game. Anything less than 8 feet and your video image will not appear on the screen properly.
2. For a lot of exercises, it simply doesn’t make sense to have the Move controller tracking your moves. For standing exercises like squats, lunges, and jumping jacks it’s great. But for exercises like push-ups and crunches it just doesn’t make sense.
3. It doesn’t use the Playstation Move XMB navigation for menus. I’ll chalk this up to the developers not knowing about it, being an early release title. Still, it gets annoying having to point a cursor and click on every button when every other Move game lets you hold down the trigger button and move the controller to navigate. Worse, you can’t even use a Dualshock or Sixaxis controller to control menu options.
4. This is an annoyance I don’t think the game developers could have done anything about, but when performing exercises that require you to be on the floor, it’s very tough on the neck to look up at the TV screen to follow the moves. Perhaps a little more vocal guidance from Mel B during these exercises would help.
5. In general, while the motion controls were a step above what you could find on the Wii, I didn’t get the sense that they made full use of the Move’s capabilities (generally, as long as there was ANY motion, it registered on the screen).
6. Tiny annoyance, but it seems the game developers forgot to convert certain screens for an American audience. When you first input your birthday, it took me a while to figure out that it was in “day-month-year” format versus “month-day-year”. And what the heck is a “gram” or “milliliter” in the recipes section?

This has all the bearings of a game which is pretty well made for a first-generation title, but probably won’t stand the test of time as newer and more innovative games come out.

Still, for someone looking for a “pure” exercise game, this is not a bad choice. It provides an impressive amount of different cardio fitness and aerobics exercises. The ability to see your own actual video image next to Mel B is not just cool–there’s no better way to help you visualize and time the exercise. And the scenery is definitely beautiful and head-and-shoulders improved over what you’d see on a Wii.

That, plus the fact that this is the first attempt at a fitness game for the PS3, gets it a solid 4 stars from me. Having said that, I hope as game developers produce more fitness titles for the PS3, that they can introduce more “gaming” elements to make workouts a lot more immersive and fun.

Rating:
4 of 5

Remember when the Wii first came out, and you played Wii Sports Tennis until your arms were sore, and played Wii Sports Boxing until you were dripping in perspiration? In that sense, Wii Sports was the first “exergame” for the Wii.

I’m happy to say that Sports Champions for Sony Move is the same for the Playstation Move. It’s not a pure “exercise game”, but of the six sports it offers at least two or three will get you moving and your heart even pumping.

Sports Champions can either be purchased separately or bundled with the Playstation Eye and Move Controller.

Before you start up the game, the system will calibrate the Move controller. You’ll see an image of your room on the screen, and you need to stand within a box throughout gameplay. The system will ask you to move your controller to your shoulders, to your side, and to your beltline.

There are six sports to choose from. With each, you can select a tutorial (highly recommended) that talks you through the intricacies of each game. I’ll focus on the games that you’ll find yourself sweating to:

Gladiator Duel: This is a game where you can choose to use one or two Move controllers. It’s a heck of a lot more fun with two, as you can hold your sword in one hand and your shield in the other and control them independently (with one controller, you have to choose either the sword or the shield by pressing and holding the trigger button). Each time you block a move, it’ll fill up a power meter that’ll let you perform a combo attack. Again, the realism is phenomenal. As you fight your opponents, you’ll see damage caused to their shelds and the surrounding arena (don’t worry though, it’s still rated E for everyone–the actions are pretty violent, but there’s no blood or guts or anything like that). You’ll get a great full body workout from this one as you swing in all directions with your sword one hand and bump your opponent with the shield in the other.

Table Tennis: I love playing ping-pong in real life, and I enjoyed playing it on Wii Sports Resort with the MotionPlus. But while playing it on the Wii was a lot of fun, I found that it wasn’t the most realistic nor accurate game. I could easily beat the system by making exagerrated movements that didn’t reflect real life, and the on-screen paddle didn’t always mirror my real-life movements. With the Sony Move, you move the controller in your hand, and you see the same movement on screen. You can use real-life movements to add topspin, backspin, and sidespin. The game starts out easy enough, but by the time you advance to higher levels you’ll be working hard to beat your opponents. While the game itself isn’t too much of a workout, trying over and over again to beat the next toughest opponent is great motivation for you to work for an hour or more.

Beach Volleyball: Unlike the similar activity on EA Sports Active, this plays like actual volleyball. You have the option of using one or two Move controllers. The attention to detail is impressive. The system will move your player around the court, but for your part you have to us timing and technique to serve (underhand or overhand), bump, set, spike, and dive. The tutorial is highly recommended, as you can learn how advanced techniques like tipping and group blocking. Again, attention to detail is great with the blue ocean and the sound of the waves in the background. Again, as you master the basics and move on to more advanced levels you’ll get a great workout.

The other three sports won’t give you too much of a workout, but they’re great for showing off the capabilities of the Move.

Disc Golf: Here, you compete against each other or the CPU throwing a frisbee on a golf course trying to get to the target. The scenery is breathtaking. You’ll stand on mountaintops, contend with lush forests, and more. Like a real frisbee, you can throw with as much or as little force as you need. You pick up the frisbee by holding the “T” button, and when you release the button it releases the frisbee. The controls are remarkably accurate, although it will take getting used to throwing without having the resistance of a real frisbee.

Archery: This is a game where I’d say you need two Move controllers, so you can use one hand to hold the bow and the other to draw the arrow back (similar to Wii Sports Resort). With one Move controller, you’re basically pointing and shooting, which is hardly realistic. Again, graphics are great–you feel like you’re in the middle of Sherwood Forest.

Bocce: If you don’t know what Bocce is, think of the last time you watched Olympic curling. The rules are very similar. You throw a small ball (called a jacK or a pallino) to set the target. Then, two players (or teams) compete to see who can throw their larger cannonball-sized balls closest to the jack (knocking opponent’s balls away is possible). The game has been around since ancient times. The realism on the game is astounding. You can play on different surfaces (on soil, on a pier, or on asphalt), and the balls react accordingly. To throw the ball, you hold down the Trigger and throw using an underarm motion just like you would the real thing. Letting go of the trigger releases the ball. By adjusting your wrist motion, you can even add spin to the ball.

The details of the game are amazing, and the game developers have a great sense of humor (One of the trophies you earn after playing Bocce is called “I Have Heard of Bocce”. And there’s a neat surprise waiting for you after you win your first Bronze Cup in the different events–I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice it to say it’s a nice look into the “augmented reality” that the Move is ushering in).

Games have levels of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. But unlike other games, playing on the beginner level is definitely challenging and satisfying. Unlike other video games, the controls themselves are not “dumbed down” at beginner levels. Rather, the controls are the same at every level–it’s just that at the beginner level you get more visual “hints” on how to perform your best and the opponents skills are also at a beginner level. So the game won’t get old quickly, because as soon as you master the techniques and dominate at the beginner levels, you get to move on to stronger and stronger opponents and the visual hints start disappearing as you no longer need them.

You might notice the word I keep repeating is “realism”. One thing I appreciate is that Sony didn’t just ape the Wii by copying its cartoony look and feel. Instead, the graphics are photorealistic and really show off the advanced graphics capabilities of the PS3. And while I was initially blown away by the “coolness” factor of the Move Controller, I quickly forgot about that as I immersed myself into actually playing the game–which is a good sign that Sony did its job. None of the games are exactly like the real thing, of course, but they all come closer than any other video game experience before.

It’s a great first effort for Sony. Hopefully it’ll be a good foundation on which other game developers will create new, precise, and fun interactive workout titles.

Rating:
5 of 5

I’ve owned the PS3 since it was first released, choosing it at the time over other systems like Xbox and Wii because  of innovations such as Blu-Ray and HD graphics. The Blu-Ray was great (I can’t go back to watching standard DVDs anymore), and the graphics on my PS3 games were impressive, but admittedly my PS3 started collecting dust the day I bought a Wii for my nephew and nieces.

It wasn’t too long before I had to get one myself. Let’s just say that I am blessed with…low metabolism. My friends can eat and eat and eat and not gain weight, while I’ll gain 10 pounds just thinking about food. There was something great about how the Wii made you get up out of your chair and move. I successfully lost weight using Wii exercise games, and even started the site Nutwiisystem.com to help others.

But I always hoped that the PS3 would some day support motion controls. As much as I love the Wii and its cute cartoony characters, there’s just something cool about the “virtual reality” of boxing with a real tough looking fighter or hitting fastballs off someone who looks like a real major league pitcher.

Sony’s been a big disappointment to me in recent years. I was irate when they ripped out OtherOS functionality (that was one of the reasons I bought the system in the first place). And I pretty much stopped buying games for the system. I found that the games I played more were on the Wii. Although the Wii, too, was getting a little dry.

And so, I was happy to hear that Sony was coming out with Wii-like motion controls. Sony and Microsoft had all mocked Nintendo back in 2006, but 80,000,000 Wii units later, Nintendo had the last laugh. I was also happy to hear that both were not content to just copy Nintendo’s technology, but actually took it a step further with their own engineering. The burning question, of course, is…did Sony come up with a cheap imitation of the Wii, or did they surpass it?

I’m happy to report the latter. I am very, very impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

I ordered the Playstation Move Starter Bundle, which comes with the Playstation Eye camera, the Sports Champions disc, the Move Controller, and a Game Demo disc. If you don’t have a Playstation 3 already, you can get the PlayStation 3 with Move bundle. And be sure to pick up extra Move Controllers, for reasons I’ll describe below.

The Starter Kit came all wrapped in plastic and in a box which I was happy to see was much smaller than I was expecting (I also picked up a Navigation Controller, which it turns out wasn’t really necessary.

The Move Controller basically looks like a microphone with a plastic ball on top. I’ve seen pictures and always assumed the ball was blue and made of rigid plastic, but it’s white (it’ll glow different colors) and the plastic was soft. Unlike the Wii remote, the battery is built-in and charged using a USB cable.

The Playstation Eye has been around for a while, but never quite caught on (there were a handful of PSN games that used it, but nothing too exciting). It’s basically a high-end Web cam. I already had an Eye, but given the bundled pricing of the kit, it made sense for me to just get another one.

The demo disc contains an “introductory video” (basically a long commercial with bunch of game scenes set to “I Live to Move It”), a Setup Guide, and demos for Sports Champions, Start the Party, EyePet, Kung Fu Rider, TV Superstars, The Shoot, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, Time Crisis, Echochrome II, Beat Sketcher, and Tumble. Beat Sketcher (where you draw on your screen over an image of yourself) and Tumble (where you use the Move controller to move and stack blocks) are both excellent showcase applications where you can show your friends the capabilities and technology of the Move.

The Setup Guide shows you a little introduction to the Move. Then it takes you through setting up the Motion Controller and the Playstation Eye. Setup was a snap. To set up the Motion Controller, you connect a USB cable to it to charge up its battery (a red LED will blink while it’s charging). Press the PS button to pair the controller to your system. (The unit should be fully charged and disconnected from the USB cable before using it).

To connect the Eye, you have to set the camera to “wide angle move” by turning the lens so the right so the white dot points to the blue dot (something I never knew you could do). You can place it above or below the middle of your TV screen (closest to your shoulder is best). Then, plug it into a free USB port on the PS3. In the documentation they say the Eye must be about 5 to 6.5 feet from the TV, while on the game it says 8 feet. From my experience, 6 feet was good enough, which was just right for my tiny apartment.

The Setup Guide continues with tips, all of which should be familiar to anyone who’s played a Wii, complete with pictures of silhouettes of people knocking lamps over. It does add tips about room lighting, which of course wasn’t an issue with the Wii.

When you start up Sports Champions, your Controller will start to blink. Point the blinking controller to the Eye and hit the “Move” (squggly) button in front + the Trigger (T) button on the back. The controller will turn a bright purple when it’s connected (I admit, I was giddy with excitement when I first saw this). Scroll down reading the terms and conditions where you agree not to sue Sony when you knock Aunt Betty’s lamp into her pet cat, and then you can get started.

Before playing a game, you have to calibrate the Move controller.  The first thing you see is  an actual video image of yourself (that alone is probably the best contribution to weight loss that Sony did–instantly upon seeing myself on TV, I wanted to lose more weight). The system will tell you to stand in a certain area and move your controller to your shoulder, side, and belt buckle to calibrate (you need to adjust the camera so that your whole torso and hips are on the screen).

I’ll write a more detailed review of Sports Champions in a separate post. But I can say was the perfect game to showcase the capabilities of Move. The actions of the screen are truly one-to-one with the actions on your hand. Ping pong on the PS3 really feels like ping pong, where you can move and twist your paddle in real-time (as opposed to in Wii Sports Resort where movement is hurky-jerky and you can beat the system by flailing your arms in an unnatural way). When your real body moves, your on-screen view moves too. And as much as I love my little Mii, there was something nice about controlling photo-realistic looking characters on the screen (the upcoming Kinect Sports uses cartoony characters, so Sony’s alone right now as far as realism in sports games). And since this is a fitness and exercise blog, I will say that yes, I felt my heart rate go up and my muscles get stronger after a few bouts of Gladiator Duel.

As far as figuring out the controls, it was pretty easy, as the Move Controller pretty much mimics the Wii remote (although I was a little disappointed that the controllers don’t have speakers in them).

I’d thought that the Move Navigation Controller (not included in the Starter Kit, unfortunately) would be the equivalent of the Wii nunchuk. It is in the sense that it’s held in your other hand and has a joystick, but it’s not in that it doesn’t have motion control. I’d say it’s really just another version of the Dualshock controller, just one that’s shaped more easily to fit in your hands. I haven’t found a game where you actually need it (in most cases it’s fine, if a little clunky, to hold your regular Dualshock controller in your left hand and use the buttons and joystick with your thumb).

For games that do require controls in both hands, they’ll usually give you the option of using two Move Controllers. From Sports Champions alone, I’d say buying a second Move Controller is required, as the experiences of games such as Gladiator Duel and Archery seem incomplete with only one.

Overall, I’d say that the Playstation Move feels and looks like a “next generation” Wii. Having said that, you will pay a price. To purchase a Playstation console, a Move Starter Kit, three more Move Controllers, four Navigation Controllers, and a few games will run you close to $1000. In this economy, that’s not easy. So I’m going to guess that the Wii will still do just fine as a casual gaming platform for families and friends to play together. On the other hand, relative weakness of Sony’s other launch titles notwithstanding, it’s hard not to feel excited about the potential of the Move, especially with technologies like 3D coming down the road very soon.

And so, I’ll give this five out of five stars. Sony has made the right move, and we’ll see how Microsoft and Nintendo counter. Hopefully the competition will wake up an industry that’s clearly been in need of it, and we’ll see great fitness games for Playstation, Wii, and Xbox.

Just as I do for Wii Fitness Games, in the coming months, I’ll be reviewing the best PS3 games that can be used for fitness and exercise. It should be an exciting couple of months, so stay tuned!

Rating:
5 of 5