Sweating to the Ubis

What do you mean "Time doesn't just stop because you haven't posted anything in a while"?  Sigh. Fine. This is a post about a whale. No! This is a post about playing video games. 

I am still using Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012 for my morning routines. Since June 29th, I have used the software 74 times (roughly every other day), and I have done 2,531 crunches, 3,083 push-ups, and burned 13,928 calories (probably 20% more than that, like I've mentioned before). I am on track to make my goal of becoming a "brown belt" (15k calories) by Thanksgiving. Well, the phrases "on track" and "my goal" are a little strong, since it implies a concerted effort and a can-do attitude, possibly accompanied by montage footage of me smirking at and crossing off dates on a calendar while the theme song from Karate Kid plays in the background.  Nah.  The numbers just happen to add up that way. 

After the brown belt level is the black belt level which you reach at a whopping 50000 calories. At the rate at which I am being scored it would take me another full year to hit this mark (200 scored calories an hour every other day)! Wow.  Beyond that, there are one, two, and three star levels that go up to an incredible 250,000 calories.  That last one, folks, would take me until the year 2020 to reach. 

And yet a quick web search shows that there are lots and lots of people out there with this very achievement. Since the game was released a little over two years ago, that must mean that there are people out there that use the software every single day for at least 100 minutes a day! These are some motivated people, right? Well, maybe some are. But, like with everything else, there's an exploit, a cheat, or "one weird trick" to get you there.

It turns out that the number of calories burned are calculated using the player's body weight, height, and age, (estimated BMI... meh, makes sense), in addition to the type of exercise being done (aerobic or non-aerobic). By setting the weight to max (about 400 lbs), height to minimum (2 feet, I think) and age to minimum you max out this rate of burn. Now, if you carefully roll a desk chair in front of the camera, start a Run the World exercise, drape a blanket over the chair to disguise its shape, and slowly back away out of the range of the camera, you can apparently trick the game into thinking you are still there. You will not move on the screen, of course, but the calorie counter will tick up steadily, reaching the achievement in days instead of years. 

Neat. Utterly pointless, but neat nonetheless.  

Don't get me wrong: the achievements have their place and I like getting the in-game badges. As a matter of fact I have all of the badges and certificates you can get in the game at this calorie level without buying DLC, dancing, or pretending you are a tree (yoga).  Since I won't be going after any of those and the calorie counter occasionally freezes, I just use the pre- and post-workout sweat drenched-ness of my shirt as my main metric for how I am doing. [Editor’s Note: Actually, thanks to my new Uplay account via Rocksmith 2014, I now have access to three more routines in this game that I didn’t before, so that’s three more badges.]

Oh, yeah, I think I figured out the reason for the freezes. My old hypothesis was that if you scored very near but not quite 100% on a routine, are told that the routine was "perfect" or "flawless" (due to rounding I guess), AND the next routine had a different target heart rate, the likelihood of a lock-up was pretty high, and there wasn't anything you could do except wait for the software to fix itself.  I am pretty sure now that is wrong. 

My new guess is that sometimes, due to limitations in the Kinect or some sort of software bug the program will "lose you" for a split second and not report it audibly like it does when you walk off camera ("Hey, where did you go?" or "Ok, we'll continue when come back" or whatever)  When this glitch happens, it sets a switch in the code to a calorie burn rate of zero per second. This burn rate switch is not reset to the correct value until you "come back", but, since you never actually left in the first place (your stylized image is still there, and the game never saw you leave), you can't "come back", causing the next several sets of exercises to report zero calories earned. Most of the time, this eventually fixes itself but I don't have a good feel for how. Maybe the glitch happens again, acting as some sort of “reset”.

I do have a simple fix, though, which has worked out ok when I notice the counter has frozen. The fix also seems to take care of the times when the software simply refuses to believe that you are "sideways, facing the same way as your coach", regardless of how many times you curse and scream things along the lines of "I AM SIDEWAYS! I LITERALLY CAN'T GET MORE SIDEWAYS THAN THIS!  THIS IS THE MAXIMUM EXTENT OF MY SIDEWAYS-NESS! SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!".

After the current set is done I walk off camera and wait a couple of seconds for the PAUSE screen to come up.  When I resume the game, the software has re-acquired me properly and the calories once again are counted as they should be. I have not needed to do this more than once during a session, and it only takes a moment, so it's not that big of a hassle and I don't stand around cooling off when I should be exercising. Of course, this does not work with the Boot Camp classes since you don't get breaks; you would have to walk off in the middle of a set, making the whole point of doing the class at all a little weak...  It's a little disheartening to see your eight-minute Boot Camp effort has earned you only 11 calories (the same number you would burn by sitting quietly, according to WolframAlpha), but, hey, nothing's perfect.

There are rumors of Santa bringing a Wii U, but it doesn't sound like the exercise stuff there is any great step up from the stuff on the original Wii.  Since I won’t be getting a new Xbox until after what I am sure will be known as “The Great Xbox One Privacy Scandal of 2014” has been sorted out my options are a little limited.

So… Will I continue on with this software indefinitely?  No.  I like it a lot, but I will probably switch back and forth between this one and the Nike+ one after I hit the Brown Belt level, since there aren't any other good options available.

Hmm…  I wonder how many calories double-tapping in Rocksmith 2014 burns…