Eyetoy: Kinetic - One Week On

So I’ve had a bit longer to play with the Eyetoy:Kinetic, and wanted to post a few additional impressions:

(1) It’s possible to max out on the games.

I hadn’t expected this. I’ve managed to hit level 10 in several games (only combat games so far, and only on the “easy” difficulty level). Once you complete level 10, the game just… stops. You get a message that the level has been completed, and you go to the statistics screen – and you don’t get the opportunity to play out the normal time that would be allocated to the game.

Assuming this is possible for all games, not just combat, this is a real problem. Not so much for mind-body games, where you can still achieve your goal even if you don’t play for the full time, but for cardio and combat games, where part of the point is to sustain your heart rate for a particular period of time. When the games max out, your heart rate necessarily declines while you move through the end screens to start another game – interfering, in my opinion, with the training goals.

I can understand that they wouldn’t want the games to be infinitely self-generating – after a certain point, making a game faster and more complex will probably lead to random, unsafe movements, rather than controlled, training movements. I would think, though, that a better approach might be for the program to let you continue working out for the remainder of your normal time, even after you max out on levels. (I’d also think that, from a competitive point of view, it might be interesting to add an option, after you reach “master” level, to see how much you could complete in the allocated time period.)

It’s possible, of course, that higher difficulty levels don’t work the same way – that this is just the program’s polite way of suggesting that you move on to bigger and better things. I’ll let you know – if I manage to get past ten levels at a higher difficulty…

(2) It looks as though personal training mode increases the number of weekly workouts over time.

When I first set up my personal training program, I self-reported that I was sedentary. After a few months with Yourself!Fitness, this was no longer a correct description, and the personal training program has been obligingly easy. (This has left me with enough energy to test out the pre-designed routines and to add some routines of my own, as well as supplementing my workout with Yourself!Fitness.) Kinetic therefore started me on three days a week, with just a warm-up, two games, an optional toning component, and a cool down.

Although Kinetic supposedly adjusts the difficulty of future workouts based on how you do each week, it also allows you to scroll forward to look at the routines currently scheduled for future weeks. I’ve noticed that Kinetic gradually increases the number of games included in each week’s workout – but also appears to increase the number of days a week it expects you to work out.

Which brings me back to the fact that I still haven’t found a way to alter the days Kinetic expects you to work out, or to set a maximum length on the workout. Yourself!Fitness still stacks up better here and, as the Kinetic program becomes more intense, there are likely to be schedule issues. In one respect, though, Kinetic is more flexible about scheduling than Yourself!Fitness: where Maya will reprimand you if you miss a particular day (even if you “make up” the exercise the following day), Kinetic, by setting a date range for your workouts, does make it possible to move workouts around without violating the schedule – as long as you don’t try it on the very last day in the date range for a workout.

(3) Some exercises seem to work better with the Eyetoy than others.

I have very few difficulties with the Eyetoy on cardio routines. On combat and mind-body routines, however, I frequently run into sensitivity problems where objects in the game interact with something other than my body, or where the game doesn’t register my movements. I find myself moving closer to the Eyetoy during the combat games – which minimises errors, but causes me to worry that I’m doing well on those games (after an initial disastrous experience caused by setting the Eyetoy sensitivity too high) mainly because my body fills the screen…

Next week, the PS2 moves into another room, where I can exercise against a blank wall. I expect this to improve things.

(4) Combat games provide high-intensity “interval” training.

I wasn’t so thrilled with the combat games when I wrote my first review. With a bit more experience (and a better Eyetoy sensitivity setting), I now actually really enjoy them. They’re basically interval training – an opportunity to push your heart rate to higher intensities than normal aerobic exercise will. You won’t burn many calories during the actual game, but the theory behind interval-style training is that you rev your metabolism, so that you burn more the rest of the day. Yourself!Fitness doesn’t offer anything designed around this kind of cardio intensity, so Kinetic’s combat games are a really good addition.

(5) Kinetic’s floor exercises, warm-ups and cool downs are essentially glorified exercise videos.

Now that I’ve done a few more floor exercise sequences, I can confirm that, at least within a difficulty level, these sequences are identical from one play to the next. While they aren’t bad (and I, personally, actually like having the same warm-up and cool down each day, as it forms a nice exercise “ritual” to get me in the mood to work out), I vastly prefer Yourself!Fitness for toning – both because the variety holds interest a bit better, and because Yourself!Fitness gives you the ability to bump up or down the difficulty level of individual exercises or of the routine as a whole, so that your toning routine becomes very highly tailored to your ability level.

It’s unfortunate, actually, that there is no option in Yourself!Fitness to skip the cardio and line up the toning exercises from the start – then I could easily play the cardio games in Kinetic, and use Yourself!Fitness in place of Kinetic’s optional floor exercise routines. By the same token, I wish there were some way to line up just the cool down portion of a Kinetic routine (the cool down option only seems to come up if you’ve first selected, and played, one game or toning exercise in Kinetic).

My ideal workout program would be Kinetic’s warm-up and games, followed by Yourself!Fitness’ toning exercises, followed by Kinetic’s cool down…

I’ll keep posting what I learn as I progress through Kinetic’s 12-week sequence…