It looks to me more like a proof of concept at the moment, though, rather than the best that can be done with the idea. Imagine if, instead of just a park, the game had you jogging through spectacular locations you could never run around in real life. Say the tops of the Himalayas, or a glass tunnel under the sea. Surely they could come up with some amazing sights that would help distract you from the fact that you were actually exercising.
And that's just on the limited hardware of the Nintendo Wii.
On a more capable machine, they could give you entire virtual cities to jog through. You could choose which route you take. You could run through New York one day (even GTA IV's "Liberty City" approximation would be nice) and Paris the next. You could jog up to a next-gen rendered Machu Pichu.
Come on, tell me that wouldn't be something that would seriously interest the many of us who have difficulty motivating ourselves to exercise. Doesn't matter whether it's raining outside. Doesn't matter if it's late at night and you live in a rough neighbourhood. Doesn't matter if your suburban surroundings just don't inspire the slightest bit of interest in you any more. Not if you can just put a videogame controller in your pocket and jog along the rim of a volcano.
Tell me that's not gold.
ELSEWHERE: While we're on the subject of GTA, another few serious annoyances to add to the list:
- Load times, still - they continue to be placed at stupid, time-wasting moments (such as when you die, before you can choose instead to reload a savegame)
- Frustrating controls - Niko can only run forward and backward: if you want him to step back and to the left, for example, he has to actually turn before he can do it. Getting him to climb a ladder can be an exercise in frustration.
- Counterproductive xbox "achievements" that punish you for playing the game the way they claim it's supposed to be played - one of the major unlockable achievements for GTA on the xbox is completing the game in under 30 (real time) hours. This is not particularly challenging - unless you've actually been playing the game the way they've suggested you play it, as an experience to be explored, before you actually get around to tackling the missions seriously - in which case you'll miss the deadline. And have to start from scratch.
- Poorly-designed missions where the goal is confusing until you've tried and failed - for example, missions where you've got to chase and kill a character will sometimes require you to actually shoot them down on the road before they can escape; others expect you to just tail them until a pre-arranged scene occurs and they can be easily dispatched, for example on foot after they crash. You won't know which this current mission is until you've stuffed it up and had to waste time reloading etc.
- Long missions with no mid-mission savepoints or checkpoints - you can find yourself playing a ten or fifteen minute mission, something going unpredictably wrong stupidly at the end and having to do it all over again. Given how slow the game is to reload, and how long it takes to just drive back to the mission start point (if you use the "instant restart" selection after dying it takes more time out of your 30 hour deadline), that's extremely annoying.
Seriously, I don't know how much I can recommend this game. When it's good, it's pretty damn good, but much of the rest of the time IT'S INFURIATING.
It's like Rockstar have become the George Lucas of videogame companies - they've been so successful in the past that no-one can tell them when they're screwing something up.
