As with most of these fitness games, it is also important tomake sure you perform the exercises correctly so you don't pull or strainsomething. Your Shape doesn't teach you how to do any of the routinesbeforehand, so you learn by watching your fitness trainer perform them on thescreen. This is fine for the most part, but when it comes to the stretches andyoga positions, it's easy to put strain on your back or neck while trying tolook at the screen to make sure you are performing correctly. It's not hard toimagine people waking up sore the next day because they were doing somethingincorrectly.
Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 is the sequel to Your Shape: Fitness Evolved, the #1 fitness franchise on Kinect for Xbox 360. Exercise your way with a fun and customizable experience that delivers serious results. Your Shape includes over 90 hours of activities, so you can design a workout tailored to your fitness level, goals, schedule and preferences. Focus your workouts on specific muscle groups. And choose from fitness activities like Boot Camp, Cardio Boxing, Jump Rope and Yoga, and new dance classes like Latin, Hip-hop, African and Bollywood. The state-of-the-art motion tracking provides feedback on your moves, and now tracks floor exercises like push-ups and sit-ups. With Your Shape Center, share and compete with your friends and the global community.
Families can talk about game-based fitness training. Does turning exercise into an interactive experience make it more appealing? Do you think you would be more likely to maintain a fitness routine in your living room than, say, at a gym?
The appeal of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is hard for exercise buffs to deny. While other fitness games allow you plenty of room to cheat your way out of a good workout, the Kinect hardware tracks your whole body. You see a representation of your entire form right there on the screen, and the game tracks your every motion, telling you when you need to squat lower or when to raise your arms higher. It knows things, and that kind of omniscience means Your Shape should, in theory, be a terrific step in meeting your specific health needs or at maintaining a healthy lifestyle in the comfort of your (ideally spacious) living room. It could have been the ultimate fitness product, if only it always functioned properly and all of its features had worked at launch. Your Shape doesn't do a consistent job of rewarding you for performing proper movements, particularly if you aren't wearing skin-tight clothing. The game isn't all it could have been, but it's still a fascinating and flexible workout tool that reminds you of its worth whenever you wake with sore quads and triceps the morning after.
The most striking aspect of Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is the way it renders your body onscreen in menus and during workouts. By default, your shimmering onscreen shape glows with a particular color, but you can change to a remarkably realistic representation if you prefer. You see yourself alongside your virtual trainer, making it easy to compare your movements to his (or hers, if you choose a female trainer). It's not a camera-perfect image, but the game makes use of stylized visual touches to make your slightly fuzzy form feel like a natural fit on the screen. During tai chi and yoga exercises, flower petals float from your limbs, as if to represent the stress and calories dissolving away. During the hula-hoop fitness game, bouncy balls gather up around you into a tornado of primary color. Tranquil music and floating water lilies accompany your Zen exercises, while other workouts might occur on a rooftop, with a sterile cityscape as your backdrop. The menus are on the fiddly side, but the interface is pleasantly slick, emitting soft blips when you hover your hands over various buttons or step on them. Your Shape isn't a beauty or a charmer, but it provides a serene, avant-garde context to your squats and leaps.
Things pick up when you move over to the fitness games. You can play them on your own or trade places with up to three other players to compete for high scores. The best of these involves punching and kneeing blocks in front and on either side of you. Not only do the smashing sound effects and visuals give it a bit of flash, but the game knows when you are using the correct arm and when you aren't, which is pretty neat. In fact, Your Shape does an excellent job of sensing your motions in all of these activities. In one of them, you hold your arms out to balance a board and collect falling blocks. In another, you step about and hop on a circular grid that looks a bit like the electronic Simon game. This game can take a bit of time to get used to, so you might fumble around the first few times, but once you memorize the patterns, it becomes a lot more enjoyable.
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