Wii Fit - Review
; Author: Howard Sambrook
Nintendo's most ambitious self-improvement title yet, broken down to its core, Wii Fit is really just a series of themed mini-games with a novel pressure-sensitive stand-on controller, and a progress graph loosely tying it all together, toward the goal of keeping you fit.
Under more scrutiny it starts to look like an interactive exercise DVD; demonstrating movements, gauging successes and offering hints and feedback for better balance and posture.
With further play, Wii Fit's many successes and one or two shortcomings become apparent. Setting your own goals becomes compulsive, ensuring you'll be back time and time again, be it for a few minutes or entire hours.
Wii Fit makes exercising fun, much more so than going for a run or heading down the gym. It's also social. You can set up to four Miis to train alongside each other in Wii Fit's Virtual Plaza, with a colour-coded graph charting your progress. By using Body Mass Index (BMI - height versus weight) Nintendo has opted for the tried and tested way to determine ideal weight range. You stand on the board, input your details, get weighed (factoring in clothing), find out if you're underweight, ideal, overweight or obese, pick a game and go for glory.
You compete with others. You challenge yourself. That's Wii Fit's greatest achievement, giving everyone from kids and casual-playing parents to exercise obsessives and many others, the context to burn calories or build muscle with fun regular activity.
But where Wii Fit's strengths are, also lay it's weakness, that same everyman approach of offering upwards of forty mini-games means it's a very accessible, dip-in, dip-out affair, which lacks the structure you'd expect from a product purporting to help tone, shape and train your body.
Wii Fit does provide a virtual trainer, who will take you through the more serious yoga and muscle workouts and act as a mirror image while you try them for yourself. They'll also tell you which exercise tone which parts of your body, and upon finishing one will advise you to attempt another that's complimentary. For example, Finished the Warrior yoga pose? How about Lunge muscle workout too? So in that sense, Wii Fit is really beneficial.
Once again a strength becomes an Achilles' Heel as there's no training regimen. It's open ended, with no handholding. You have to set your own goals, Wii Fit won't design a plan for you, advising which workouts to do within a given timescale, which in all fairness is something a Personal Trainer would offer.
So to that end, Wii Fit should be regarded more as a compliment to regular exercise, or a launchpad to it, rather than a full replacement. Wii Fit favours the casual player; the
Yoga-friendly Mum; the under active office worker with a few hours to kill on evenings; the Redknap family from the ads. If that's you, then Wii Fit will be great value.
It is great fun, very inventive and when played together it's the ultimate take-turns novelty party game; guaranteed to get laughs whilst someone gyrates madly playing hula hoop, or falls flat on their face doing press-ups. Jogging doesn't even use the board; you run with the Wii-mote in your pocket, and can be done with a friend. And succeeding at exercises not only gives harder versions of them, but gives you time in the Fitpiggy - Wii Fit's piggy bank which unlocks new mini-games the more you play. So you get a pleasing sense of progress and achievement.
Wii Fit has truly stamped its mark on the gaming world since its release and the balance board has become a much used peripheral within many recent releases ? as concepts go Nintendo has not only spotted the gap in the market and executed a stylish clean white design and easy to use fitness device, that not only enables you to use more of your body to be part of an incredibly immersive gaming experience but a wonderful tool to assist you in keeping fit, albeit not a total replacement for a out of living room fitness regime.