Fighting Fit?

If you’ve been following our Wii Fitness Club recently, you’ll have an idea of what Wii Fit, Nintendo’s most ambitious self-improvement title yet, is all about. If you haven’t then you should take a look, if only to marvel at how ridiculous we all look attempting Wii Fit’s many balance games, muscle workouts, aerobic exercises and yoga poses.

Broken down into its core components, Wii Fit is really just that; a series of themed minigames with a novel pressure-sensitive stand-on controller, and a progress graph loosely tying it all together. Apply more scrutiny and 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 still, Wii Fit’s many successes and one or two shortcomings become apparent.

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 their progress. By using Body Mass Index (BMI – height versus weight) Nintendo has opted for a tried and tested way to determine ideal weight range, and setting your own goals becomes compulsive, ensuring you’ll be back time and time again, be it for a few minutes or entire hours a day.

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 gamer kids and casual-playing parents to exercise obsessives and more the context to burn calories or build muscle with fun regular activity.

Dip-in, dip-out

But Wii Fit slips up on that same everyman approach. Offering upwards of forty minigames, it’s a very accessible, dip-in, dip-out affair, but lacks the structure you’d expect from a product purporting to help tone, shape and train your body.

To its credit, Wii Fit does present 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. It also tells you which exercises tone which parts of your body, and upon finishing one will advise you to attempt another that’s complimentary. Finished the Warrior yoga pose? How about Lunge muscle workout too? In that sense, Wii Fit’s great.

But there’s no training regimen. It’s open ended, with no handholding. You do set your own goals, but Wii Fit won’t design a plan for you, advising which workouts to do within a given timescale.

Wii Fit favours the casual player; the Yoga-going housemum; the office worker with a few hours to kill on evenings; the play-together family from the ads. If that’s you, then Wii Fit will be great value. But Wii Fit should be regarded more as a compliment to regular exercise, or a launchpad to it, rather than a replacement for getting out and about.

But gosh, it’s fun. And very inventive. Played together it’s the ultimate take-turns novelty party game; guaranteed to get laughs when 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 Wiimote 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 minigames the more you play. So the sense of progress and achievement is pleasing.

It remains to be seen how Wii Fit will endure – but as a concept Nintendo have certainly spotted a gap in the market, and the execution is stylish indeed; all crisp, clean white design and easy-use, hi-sophistication tech. A dedicated training option may be missing and the price may be higher than usual, but massive motivation it gives, the stand-out social aspect, and the probability of a follow-on disc should all make Wii Fit a strong investment.

GAME's Verdict

• A great motivator for getting in shape and a launchpad to a healthier lifestyle.
• Lots of fun played with friends and/or family members.
• Complimentary exercises and unlockables give Wii Fit a great sense of progress and achievement.

• No dedicated training mode: You set your own goals, but Wii Fit won't suggest an entire regimen like you'd get at a gym.
• Not a replacement for actually getting out and about.
• BMI is a flawed measurement for those with high muscle mass.

Review by: Mark 'Muscles' Scott
Version Tested: Wii
Review Published: 22.04.08