XboxFitness.org

The Best Exercise Games for the Xbox Kinect

UPDATE 1/8/13 10:58 AM – Hooray (sort of). The squeaky wheels gets the grease (sort of). After bugging Microsoft and ePrize (the folks who maintain Xbox Live Rewards), they finally came to some clarity. Their landing page for the promotion has been updated to display the official list of games that are eligible for the “play for 20 hours, get 100 points” promotion AS WELL AS the “buy 800 points in add-ons, get 100 points” promotion. The games are:

  • Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012
  • Zumba Fitness
  • Your Shape Fitness Evolved
  • Zumba Fitness: Rush
  • Zumba Fitness: Core
  • Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure
  • UFC Personal Trainer
  • EA Sports Active 2
  • My Self Defense Coach
  • Harley Pasternak’s Hollywood Workout
  • Nickelodeon Dance
  • Michael Phelps: Push the Limit
  • miCoach
  • Kinect Sports
  • Kinect Sports: Season Two
  • Nike+Kinect Training
  • Rapala for Kinect
  • Dance Central 1
  • Dance Central 2
  • Dance Central 3
  • The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout

Thankfully, they finally updated their FAQS to point to this page instead of a ridiculous search result to Xbox Marketplace games with “fitness” in the listing. If you’ve played Brain Challenge or Power Rangers for 20 hours already, I feel your pain. But if you’ve been hesitant to start playing any of the games on this list, play away. Of course we’ve lost 168 hours of potential playing time already in January, but there are plenty more 🙂

Now I’m off to celebrate by downloading some Gangnam Style. Speaking of which, Dance Central 3 has announced a similar program of using Dance Central songs to help with your New Year’s resolutions…no “prizes” except for a thinner waist in their case, but it looks promising and a lot more buttoned up than this promotion. I’ll highlight that on my next post.

I think Microsoft and ePrize should pay me for doing what their product managers, copywriters, Web designers, QA team, and executives all couldn’t. Who’s with me? 🙂

UPDATE 1/6/2013 1:30 PM- So, the Twitter conversation has evidently come to an end. The Xbox Live crew is still insisting that their site is completely updated. Unfortunately, if any of their staff there did even 10 seconds of looking into it, they’d realize that:

1) They’re saying that the list of games listed on their landing page represents the list of Eligible Games you can play for 20 hours to get your 100 points. Okay, if that’s the case, maybe they should change the paragraph heading to say “Eligible Games” instead of “Eligible Game Add-ons”

20 They’re saying that the list of eligible game add-ons is here. What they fail to realize is that this is just a keyword search for any game on their site that contains the word “fitness” and doesn’t include what should be eligible titles such as Dance Central 3 or Kinect Sports.

Honestly, at this point I’m thinking it’s probably not worth spending too much time; if they don’t care enough about this promotion to provide us with accurate information, maybe you and I shouldn’t either. Just play your Kinect games as much as you can, and if you get the 100 points, that’s great, if you don’t, no big loss.

UPDATE 1/4/2013 7:00 AM – So, I’ve been having a little back-and-forth with the Xbox Rewards Twitter folks for the last few days. To their credit, they’re pretty responsive. But unfortunately, they have yet to come up with a suitable solution. They sent me a “fixed” link of add-ons that doesn’t even match their landing page. As for the FAQ for eligible games to meet the 20 hours, they “fixed” the link in their FAQ by pointing to the landing page–which still doesn’t contain any information.

Hopefully in the coming days they’ll put together a real list, but it’s not looking good. As 4 days in January have passed already, about 96 hours of potential playing time has been lost. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder whether the $1.25 worth of points is really worth it 😛

UPDATE 1/2/2013 2:00 PM – Well, it seems that the folks who man the Twitter account of Xbox Live Rewards are sticking by their guns and saying that the 16 games below are the ones you need to play 20 or more hours of. This means you get credit for playing “Brain Challenge” but not for “Dance Central 3”.

I’m still holding out hope that someone at Microsoft will come to their senses and realize that the list below is not a complete one, but until then the official word is in. More updates as I see them.

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So, it seems that Microsoft is getting into the action (literally) of incentivizing you to work out to start 2013 right. They’ve just announced a program where you can earn up to 200 Microsoft Points for working out with your Xbox this January. Here’s the scoop:

1) You can get 100 Microsoft Points for playing 20 hours or more of any combination of Kinect Fitness games. Here’s a supposed list.

– Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012
– Zumba Fitness
– Your Shape Fitness Evolved
– Zumba Fitness: Rush
– Zumba Fitness Core
– Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure
– UFC Personal Trainer
– EA Sports Active 2
– Self Defense Training Camp
– Harley Pasternak’s Hollywood Workout
– Nickelodeon Dance
– Michael Phelps: Push the Limit
– miCoach
– Power Rangers Super Samurai
– Brain Challenge

I say “supposed” because I pulled this official list of supported games from their FAQ page (look under “Offers & Promotions”), but I’m guessing that this is not a complete list; whoever coded this link just lazily did a search results page for the word “Fitness” on Xbox Marketplace, which doesn’t even pull up titles like The Biggest Loser and Kinect Sports nor other games on our list of best Kinect fitness games, but does inexplicably pull up “Brain Challenge” (presumably because their description contains the phrase “mental fitness”).

Still, until they update the FAQ page you’re probably better off sticking to the titles on this list to make sure you get your points. I’ve reached out to Microsoft to ask them if they can update their FAQ and provide me with a “real” list, and I’ll update this page accordingly if and when they respond.

In order to earn your 100 points, you need to make sure of the following:

  1. You’re signed up for both Xbox LIVE and Xbox LIVE Rewards (http://rewards.xbox.com/) and using the same Gametag for both.
  2. You’re signed in to this account when you’re playing the games and finish all your play before 1/31/13 at midnight UTC (that’s 8:00 PM Eastern time, 5:00 PM Pacific time).
  3. You play the games from the aforementioned list

2) To earn an additional 100 Microsoft Points, purchase 800 Microsoft Points worth of add-ons for the following fitness games:

  • Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012
  • Zumba Fitness
  • Your Shape Fitness Evolved
  • Zumba Fitness: Rush
  • Zumba Fitness: Core
  • Jillian Michaels Fitness Adventure
  • UFC Personal Trainer
  • EA Sports Active 2
  • My Self Defense Coach
  • Harley Pasternak’s Hollywood Workout
  • Nickelodeon Dance
  • Michael Phelps: Push the Limit
  • miCoach
  • Kinect Sports
  • Kinect Sports: Season Two
  • Nike+Kinect Training
  • Rapala for Kinect
  • Dance Central 1
  • Dance Central 2
  • Dance Central 3
  • The Biggest Loser: Ultimate Workout

This list is from the official announcement of this promotion. Again, the list referenced in their FAQ doesn’t even match this list. But in this case I’d feel comfortable using the list on their promotion page. I know for one, I’ll be living PSY’s pockets even more with a download of Gangnam Style 😛

Points will post to your Xbox Live account before February 27, 2013. Unfortunately, the points won’t show up as pending until the end, so you won’t be able to tell if you really earned them until you see the points in your account. I wish Microsoft could really button up their sloppy handling of promotions like these, but until they do take copious screenshots and work out longer than 20 hours to make sure you hit the mark.

More news as it develops. In the meantime, happy exercising!

Xbox LIVE Rewards-021707

 

4 Responses so far.

  1. Kristen N says:

    Those are, um, interesting choices considering for example that EA Sports Active 2 is an unsupported game. Further allowing credit for purchsing Dance Central songs, but not for exercising with Dance Central seems rather inconsistent.

    I think I’m better off sticking with the good routine I have rather than tweaking it for a (roughly) $2.50 credit towards content.

  2. Yukon Cornelius says:

    Hi … it looks like they finally fixed the landing page by saying ‘all addons for the following list of games’. I agree that both Xbox Marketing and ePrize,LLC are lazy when it comes to checking their language & FAQs, and hopefully we’ll make them pay more attention to this after the May 2012 ‘sports’ messup, and the even worse Oct 2012 ‘horror’ debacle.

    Keep up the great work … this is the first time I’ve visited your site, and I’m impressed!

    — Cornelius
    (frequent poster in CheapAssGamer’s XBLA thread)

  3. steve says:

    Thanks for the comments, Kristen and Cornelius. It seems that our long national nightmare is indeed over 🙂

    I do read and enjoy your posts from time to time when I’m on CAG, Cornelius. Welcome to my humble little site, I’m glad you like it! 🙂

  4. steve says:

    Thanks for the comments, Kristen and Cornelius. It seems that our long national nightmare is indeed over 🙂

    I do read and enjoy your posts from time to time when I’m on CAG, Cornelius. Welcome to my humble little site, I’m glad you like it! 🙂