Active Life is Namco Bandai’s take on the subject, a series that is dedicated to, not surprisingly, providing gamers with a more active lifestyle. Unbelievably, it does not accomplish this task by banking on the success of the Wii Balance Board. Active Life took another route, instead using a DDR-style mat that features eight points of interactivity. The first Active Life title, Outdoor Challenge, uses the power of mini-games to get players to break a sweat.

Upon examining the Active Life mat for the first time, players will notice that it has three blue arrows on the left (up, left and down) and a blue square in the middle. On the right side you’ll find three red arrows (up, right and down) and a red square in the middle. The color-coding is not coincidental: when playing solo, both sides are used together for one giant space of interactivity. But when playing with a friend, one player takes the blue side and the other takes the red side, allowing two people to become active simultaneously.

Single-player games range from jump rope and jumping over rolling logs to riding a mine cart and whacking moles with your feet. (Think DDR meets Whack-a-Mole.) The variety is respectable but the total amount of mini-games is barely heart-stopping. Players may get a laugh though when encountering the tubular racing (called Pipe Slider) for the first time, which challenges you to – no joke here – sit on the mat and lean from side to side. This is somewhat contradictory of the game’s purpose, but is actually one of the better mini-games in the collection.

As a mini-game offering, Outdoor Challenge is decent. The mat isn’t perfect but worked well most of the time. In fact, the biggest problems were (1) pre-game selections, which are a pain since both the mat and Wii remote are active and frequently conflict with each other, and (2) the inability to stay on the mat and hit the proper arrows while jumping feverishly. These flaws are somewhat minor though, as the first one does not affect gameplay and the second may not affect all players. In most cases, the mat performed exactly as the game demanded.

As a weight-loss program or calorie-burning device, Outdoor Challenge doesn’t do much for the player. You’ll break a sweat, but the same could be said for that old arcade rowing game, the one that made you pedal ridiculously fast, or the horse racer that made players shake their bodies like a jockey hyped up on caffeine pills. All had the potential to burn calories. But none of them did it in a fun and exciting way that held our attention.

Still, not everyone enjoys a good workout. Some people do it solely for the benefit of being fit and staying healthy. On that note, Outdoor Challenge stumbles by forgetting what it was trying to accomplish. All too often, the game becomes less of a workout starting kit and more of a mini-game collection that challenges your ability to multi-task.

In the mine cart game, you have to stand on both squares (red and blue) and pump the Wii remote (hold it sideways and shake it up and down with both hands, simulating the act of running a manual mine cart). When approaching a turn, players must lean in the turn’s direction to prevent the car from losing stability. This is perfectly acceptable – perhaps even logical – when left as is. But then the game decides to make you jump over gaps in the track. So you have to pump, lean and jump. Next, the game throws in a shooter aspect where obstacles must be shot off the track. Now you have to pump, lean, jump, crouch and shoot.

Why crouch? That depends on your setup. My typical gaming setup allows me to sit comfortably on the floor. To ensure my Wii remote reaches from that angle, I keep the sensor bar placed at the bottom of my television. Works great. But when standing (something I rarely do when playing Wii), the sensor bar cannot pick up the remote. I could change my setup, but that would require me to tape the sensor bar to the top of my television, potentially leaving glue on my TV’s slick finish. That isn’t going to happen. Besides, it would be a real hassle to do this, and no prior Wii release has required me to change my setup just to get the most out of a game.

Thus, if your setup is like mine, you’ll have to crouch down and point at the screen until the sensor bar picks up the remote and brings up the shooter image. By the time you pull this off, it may be too late to successfully complete the trial. Excluding the shooting aspect, this mini-game is still too much of a cumbersome balancing act to enjoy.

Jump rope, a summertime tradition, is hampered by the simple fact that games cannot yet measure your exact physical location. It can tell when you’ve jumped and when you’ve landed on the mat, nothing more. Consequently, you have to jump much sooner than it appears to keep from losing. Should you make a mistake, the mini-game must be played all over again from the beginning. This is true for all of the mini-games in Outdoor Challenge. If some could be skipped, that wouldn’t be so bad. But to play through the actual challenges, you must finish whatever mini-games are offered for each one.

Other mini-games challenge you to run in place (Timber Trail, Sprint Challenge and others), lean while standing (Mountain Boarder), and jump on or over specific objects (Log Leaper and Convey Runner). Kayak Attack lets you shake your arms like a maniac, but it’s difficult to control and is more frustrating than it is a workout. There is some fun to be had with Log Leaper (if you like jumping games) and Mole Stomper (if you like Whack-a-Mole), but the entertainment value is short-lived.