Back in 2010 when I reviewed EA Sports Active 2 for PS3, I loved it. It was a fairly good port of the Wii version which at the time was far and away the best video game workout for any system.

Daskreeh and Alexey both asked a very good question in the comments section of the post. With EA’s recent pulling of online support, is the game still worth having?

I’m a little torn on this one. For one thing, at a street price of Around $155, this is a great price for a game that works (as long as you stick with it, of course). Remember that for the $15, you not only get the game, you get the resistance band and the heart rate monitor. That’s a deal and a half considering that the game originally retailed for close to $100.

On the other hand, EA’s pulling of support for its online community is troublesome. The online features were never earth-shatteringly good (you could view your progress online and participate in group workouts which helped motivate you, but the signup process and the user interface were both very clunky). But what troubles me is that EA Sports had every chance in the world to improve it (unlike the video game, their online features could have been improved continuously) and they never did. I expected them to continue to evolve their online features to last through EA Sports Active 3, 4, and beyond. Instead, the recent actions of EA Sports lead me to believe that it was just a gimmick all along to get us to buy the game and that they never intended to build it into anything more.

The fact that they treat online support of EA Sports Active 2 no differently, say, than online support for outdated versions of their other sports games leads me to conclude that they just don’t understand the fitness gaming community. They treat us like “gamers”, but as anyone who’s sweated out a 9-week routine, that’s not what we are.

Worse, there is not a peep from EA Sports about a sequel like EA Sports Active 3, which makes me wonder if they’re abandoning the fitness gaming genre altogether. Which is a shame, because there is so much more they could have done by doing more “simulation” type games that combined their traditional sports games with Move.

So my recommendation–at the price it’s at now, I’d definitely still recommend it as a game you can play and completely benefit from “offline” — there was never any dependency on the online features to do things like the 9-week workout.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for something that’ll be supported for the future and a company that will continue to grow its online features, I’d suggest holding out for Adidas MiCoach instead. Because Adidas’s cloud-based online features are already established (for people using MiCoach with their PCs, iPhones, etc.), those aren’t going to be abandoned like EA did. Of course, we’ll have to see if the workout routines for MiCoach improve upon EA Sports’.