Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Okay, I know we are a gaming blog, and some might question the gaming value of a title called Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.  However, as I get to be an older age, where people call me Grandpa at E3, I feel the need to start keeping in shape.  However, I am not looking to get ‘roided out with ripped muscles, and I want to stay away from the meat market that is your local gym, so a home fitness game does appeal to me.  It should also appeal to most gamers, as being fit and happy will help your overall gaming experience, by allowing you to survive more of those all night gaming sessions when you get old and decrepit – you know when you hit 35 and older.

For those that ignored anything remotely connected to a Kinect presentation, Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is a title focused around fitness, exercise and yoga, using the new Microsoft Kinect device.  The title offers customized exercised routines based on your body shape, definition, height and other factors. 

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved starts off your exercise routine by having you stand in front of the Kinect while it scans your body into the system.  Now, it does not do a 1:1 ration scan, recreating a digital portrait of yourself on screen, instead opting for a gelatinous shapre, roughly your size and proportions.  I kind of like the idea of going this route over a traditional digital recreation, as people tend to be self concious about their body, so seeing it in a general shape might be easier on a person mentally.

The interface for Your Shape then molds itself around these measurements, putting everything at arms length.  You move your hands to positions on the screen, and in turn the system recognizes that location and moves to the represented menu.  The interface was very slick, and surprisingly responsive.  I am not sure if the program factors in a delay for the response, or if Kinect is that quick in reading movements, but it was very responsive to the motions of the person using the software.

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved offers a lot of different exercise programs for the user to alternate through, making your workouts fresh each time you load the game.  There were running drills, karate drills and even some T’ai Chi for just limbering up and finding some inner peace of mind.  Again, it seemed as if the software was very responsive to your movements during these exercises.

About the only downside to Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is that all the exercises seem to involve you doing stand up drills.  There are no sit up or push up drills, or anything of that nature.  At first, we thought this was a limitation of Kinect, but it seems to be more of a design philosophy by Ubisoft.  Some other games at the show, like Electronic Arts fitness title did push ups and other drills like this, so maybe we can see this in an expansion for the game.  Also, as funny as it sounds, I could not get an answer on achievements for Your Shape Fitness Evolved.  I was very curious as to how achievements would be worked into the system.  I mean, I do not want it to be weight loss related, as I do not have a lot of weight to lose, but I was curious as to how that would work.

Overall, I was very impressed by Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.  I believe that this is probably the killer application for Kinect at this point, because it works as advertised, it will sell well to the fitness crowd, and it is a lot of fun.  Will it appeal to everyone that owns an Xbox 360?  No, but I do think that it will expand the audience of the Xbox 360, and should be a great selling device for Kinect to casual gamers, which is what Microsoft and Ubisoft are hoping for as well.  Your Shape: Fitness Evolved is set to ship this fall as a launch title for Kinect on Xbox 360.