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

Nintendo takes the next step...

Having survived the disappointing GameCube era on Game Boy sales, the DS and Wii have together turned Nintendo's fortunes around. Once the favoured brand of t3H H@rdc0r3Z gamer, Nintendo's newfound mainstream success can be put down to some stunning crossover titles which have introduced gaming to a whole new audience.

Following on from the likes of Brain Training, Big Brain Academy and Wii Sports, Wii Fit will be the latest, and by far the most ambitious release in Nintendo's growing line of health-conscious self improvement titles.

Eye-ercise

You could look at Wii Fit as a cross between Eyetoy and an exercise DVD, but it's far more sophisticated than either. Indeed, Nintendo themselves consider Wii Fit to be the next step in getting non-gamers gaming, and making the medium an essential part of everyday family life.

It's a lofty goal, but we think that may be realistic. For instance, the technology behind Wii Fit is impressive, and yet it's so incredibly easy to use. You simply stand on the Wii Balance Board and four corner sensors measure your weight, which combines with inputted height info to calculate overall body mass index (BMI), telling you if you're underweight, overweight, just right, or need to be asking some serious questions of yourself!

And there's something for everyone here. For the exercise obsessive, Wii Fit will be a digital dream. Wii Fit's Yoga looks set to be the housewife's fave, with four positions expanding to 40 progressively harder disciplines. An on-screen instructor (male or female) will show you how it's done, and then you'll need to mimic their pose – with the board representing your balance as a moving red dot on the screen. Keep it relatively static and in the middle as you stretch out gradually, and you're golden.

Living room Rocky

Muscle conditioning in Wii Fit meanwhile may be the gym-goer's preference. You start out small, with squat thrusts and such having you leaning on the Wii Balance Board, but as you progress you'll unlock progressively harder exercises, and eventually you'll be doing hardcore one-arm push-ups like a living room Rocky Balboa.

Wii Fit's Aerobic excercises, on the other hand, would appear to be less strenuous, focusing more on cardiovascular workouts. In one you put the Wiimote in your back pocket and jog on the spot, with the gyroscope picking up your speed and transferring it to your on-screen Mii running around a virtual park. In another you must keep a hula hoop circling, and lean at certain intervals.

If that all sounds imposing, then never fear – Wii Fit also boasts plenty of ways for the casual Wii Fit player to get in shape and still make a wally of themselves in the grand tradition of the best multiplayer titles.

The balance exercises are what you could label the 'fun' component of Wii Fit. From snowboarding (stand sideways on the board and lean to steer) to ski-jump (crouch down and spring onto tiptoes and hold steady for maximum distance) to heading footballs (leaning side to side and avoiding boots and panda heads hurtling your way), plus many more, this will be Wii Fit's most accessible single and multiplayer area.

Wi[i]nner!

What's most innovative about Wii Fit, though, is the way it will offer a different experience for different people. Predicated on small-burst, daily play, Wii Fit is designed to let players have fun getting in shape however they choose, focusing on the outcome they want without being too much of a lifestyle drain or demanding timesink. By offering that and enjoyable multiplayer gameplay on top, Wii Fit could well see Nintendo onto another widespread winner.

Preview by: Mark Scott
Published: 14.03.08