Why Do You Hate Me, EA Sports Active 2 Personal Trainer, WHY?!

Mario, you smug prick.

It's no big secret that I don't like exercise. I was picked last for everything in PE at school and rightly so. I was more likely to score an own goal or incapacitate a member of my own team, due to a mixture of extreme inadequacy combined with a pathologically short attention span and a determined lack of enthusiasm for any sport that didn't involve a horse.

I'm one of those trick thin people, where I don't actually have any muscle and all the muscle I appear to have is actually cunningly constructed out of fat. Because of this, and my love for all chocolate and cheese-based foodstuffs, my beloved frequently worries for my health. He knows that while I'll consider 8 hours of tactically sniping aliens time well spent, I begrudge spending even 20 minutes doing exercise. (Unless a horse is involved, obv.) So he got smart, that wiley Northerner, and bought EA Sports Active 2.

Shut up.

At first glance, this is just one step up from a workout DVD. A chirpy fuckwit orders you around,
cheerily giving pointers to help you be the you you know you can be, or some other barely coherent motivational bullshit. You sweat, and you strain, and you get out of breath and at the end of it nothing's different except you hate the instructor even more than you hate yourself.

But then it throws in gamey stuff. There's trophies for things like burning more calories, or completing 2 hours of exercise, or trying one of each exercise type. The leg and arm bands it makes you wear monitor your heart rate and how well you recover compared to last time and plots it into a little chart, encouraging you to beat your last score. You can construct your own workouts with the handy tools and then get rewards for completing them.

And EA have done something really clever, though possibly unintentional, with their trainer. Rather than being comforting and encouraging, she's actually a patronising cow. Her praise ("I know you worked hard for that!") is just as infuriating as her taunts ("C'mon, you're going to have to run faster than that to keep up with me.") Even as I find myself in a sweaty heap on the floor, illogically waving the leg monitor in front of the TV so she can see it and screaming "I DID COMPLETE THE REP!!! I COMPLETED THE REP YOU BITCH!!!" I know I'll still do another workout on my next training day, because I don't want to give that pissy little cow the satisfaction of being able to say; "It seems like you missed a few workouts... never mind, I'm sure you'll catch up."

I might've known.

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