Health Meter: Yoga and Videogames

Putting your ankle behind your head in the palm of your hand.
8/29/2008 5:10 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Quick Yoga Training takes much more of a Western approach to things. Heck, the idea alone that yoga training could be "quick" would rattle the chi of most serious yoga practitioners. What I like about QYT is the depth of the information. There are probably twice as many poses as there are in Let's Yoga and for each you're given not only the specific benefits, but also -- and very importantly -- the things you should look out for and avoid. It's cool that it doesn't just tell you what to do; it tells you what not to do if you happen to have a pre-existing condition or if the pose doesn't feel right.

While the game does a good job of sticking to hard science, there are some things that send up red flags. An intro section mentions that one of the benefits of yoga is that it "allows oxygen to reach every part of your body, making it much harder for your body to gain fat." That's a huge stretch -- no pun intended. Later, in the Prescription Yoga section, there's a workout designed to help you "lose lower body fat." You can't spot-reduce. You don't lose fat in your lower body by working your lower body. You can add muscle and tone what you already have there by working your lower body, but you can't decide where you want to burn fat.

Like Let's Yoga, the game stresses the importance of breathing correctly. Instead of a trippy and flowery on-screen guide that you're supposed to follow, though, here -- very clinically -- you play a breathing mini-game that sets the workouts to your own real-life breathing patterns. The only thing that could be cooler would be if this mini-game could somehow be played wirelessly with others. After putting my sword-wielding skills up against all comers online in Soulcalibur IV, it would have been cool to do the same with my breathing skills. At the very least, I would have liked to have been able to upload my scores to an online leaderboard to see how my yogic breathing matched up with other gamers.

There were a couple of things that bummed me out about QYT, though. Graphically, it's very weak. While the DS is no graphics juggernaut, things look very "original PlayStation" here. More disappointing, however, is the audio. Both the cart's Web site and its packaging boast of voice navigation and voice recognition capabilities. Sadly, neither of them really exists. The voice navigation was huge in Let's Yoga, so to not have it here -- and be forced to do bonus twisting to see the screen -- was a huge drag. I was also looking forward to voice recognition. I imagined being able to say things like, "Hey, I can't feel my hand anymore. Am I doing this right?" and having the cart rewind to the point at which my posture had spun wildly out of control. Oh, well.

So, will either of these carts turn you into a human pretzel with a resting heart rate of 12 beats per minute and a Zen-like feeling of oneness with the universe? No. But either would make a good complement to any traditional yoga training you may be doing. Nintendo has been on the front line in the battle to get gamers up and moving. Now, with third-party support from publishers like Konami and Ubisoft, that daunting task has started to get easier.