Project Gutbuster

Day 50: July 20, 2006

Variety is the spice of life, or so goes the old adage. It's the spice of a good exercise program too, in my opinion. With my average attention span cut to mere seconds by 20 years of video game addiction, I get bored easily, and am still on the lookout for novel ways to extend my weight-loss efforts.

I've been focusing on Dance Dance Revolution a lot in this blog; that's mostly because it's by far the best-known video game weight loss technique, and it's comparatively cheap. But maybe DDR isn't for you? Before I dropped almost 20 pounds in two months doing it, I didn't think DDR was for me either. To be honest, I'm still not sure it is, but you can't argue too much with results.

Still, there is no shortage of alternatives, and as the videogames-as-exercise market grows more popular we're sure to see more. Over the past few weeks I've received no end of great suggestions, and first up is one from one Andy Glass, CEO of Trazer Technologies, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of high-end electronic exercise equipment.

Trazer DDR

Glass's product, also called Trazer, is a little like Eyetoy on steroids. Instead of using a camera to track your movements, though, you strap on a magnetic belt and a sensor under the TV tracks its motion. Trazer measures reaction time, acceleration, agility, power, balance and stability, and functional cardiovascular capability.

Unsurprisingly, it's proving very popular. Trazer units have found homes all over the country: at YMCAs in Rhode Island and Florida, among others, Army facilities, schools, hospitals and rehab clinics.

How about the games? While they're simplistic, they offer big advantages over tools like Eyetoy and DDR: it looks to be much more precise, for one thing, and tracks movement in three dimensions. One Trazer game makes its players negotiate a grid of trapdoors, moving both sideways and towards and away from the unit to collect disks and dodge open trapdoors -- there's no way you could do that with a simple video camera.

Glass also told me the company plans to produce software that'll allow a Trazer unit to control any computer game, working like a joystick. While I'm not sure quite which games would work well with such an off-the-wall control method -- flight sims, maybe, or racing games -- it's certainly a tantalizing prospect.

StepMania StepMania

So what's the catch? You guessed it -- the price. A cool $6,500, to be exact, and that's without a display. No, it's not a machine for home use, unless, as Glass puts it, you're "wealthy or very highly motivated." But maybe there's one in your gym or school, and if you've tried it, I'd love to hear how well it works in practice. Shoot me an email and let me know.

One of my remaining gripes with the DDR series is that the music is so... crap. This is a highly subjective point, to be sure. No doubt plenty of people enjoy the music selection as it is, and its rhythmic and repetitive nature suits the game's purpose just fine. But it'd be mighty nice to have a little more variety.

Enter Gutbuster reader Lucas, among others, who pointed me to StepMania, a free dance game that runs on the PC instead of the PlayStation or Xbox. Although there are some mats intended specifically for PC use, you can also use a regular console mat via an interface box. The helpful StepMania site has a foolproof list of compatible mats and converters.

Of course, the big advantage of StepMania is that you can use whatever music you like with it. A huge community of sites have sprung up offering packs of ready-made song and step sequence files; choose the ones you like, or make your own, and you have your own customized dance workout. Unfortunately my PlayStation to USB adapter is one of the incompatible ones, so I can't try it out right away...but watch this space. Something about the possibility of dancing to ludicrously inappropriate music amuses me. DDR: Tom Waits edition, anyone?