Exercise for gamers
Back in February, I wrote an article that brandished the rather harsh headline ‘And the award for the most pointless Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 accessory ever goes to…’.The accessory I was referring to was the GZ Pro-Sport, a mini-exercise machine and power stepper designed specifically with gamers in mind.
According to Gamercize, the idea behind GZ Pro-Sport is to “play games and get a fitness workout at the same time”. It’s never going to catch on, I guessed. I pretty much dismissed the idea based on the fact that this piece of technology, which connects via USB to your video games console or PC, freezes the game you’re playing if you dare to stop exercising. What could possibly be more infuriating to a gamer than that?
In that article I wrote:
I can understand the idea behind the GZ Pro Sport is to motivate you to keep fit and the reward for doing that is that you can play the game to your heart’s content, but when you play almost any videogame you need steady hand to play it properly, so moving around on an exercise machine is surely going to affect your judgment. Playing Halo 3 and cycling on an exercise bike would be like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach.
The developer has forgotten one crucial thing about its target audience; gamers are lazy, we're couch potatoes. The audience for this type of product is extremely limited. At best, I can only see it being a short term fad for chubby Wii-owning housewives or for parents who, rather than exert some control over their kids and get them doing some exercise, buy this as a conscious salver while never admitting that their kids will never use it. The rest...you can forget it.
They did send me a review sample and after a few months of testing, I’m ready to give my final verdict…
