Wii Fit with Wii Balance Board

Released on 25/04/2008

• Wii Fit Preview

  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!

  Wii Fit will be the latest, and by far the most ambitious release in Nintendo's growing line of health-conscious self improvement titles.

  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.

  Wii Fit also boasts plenty of ways for the casual Wii Fit player to get in shape and still make a wally of themselves.

  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

  Published: 14/03/2008

• Wii Fit Review

  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.

  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 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 should be regarded more as a compliment to regular exercise, or a launchpad to it, rather than a replacement.

  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

  Published: 22/04/2008

• Wii Fit Review

  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.

• Get Off yer Couch!

  Get Off yer Couch!

  Asthmatic athletics

  

  The popular image of video games is that of a pastime requiring no more physical effort than a sofa slouch and nimble thumbs – along with a carb-heavy diet of pizza and sugary soda. The fast-track to a slow death from obesity, in other words.
  

  Fitness games fly in the face of that assumption, but they're not the recent invention many think they are. Even as far back as 1982, companies like Atari were looking at ways of connecting exercise bikes to a virtual reality under the codename Project Puffer. In 1986, Bandai released a control mat for the Nintendo Entertainment System which came with Family Fun Fitness, a suite of exercise games. Nintendo was so impressed, it bought the product and repackaged it as the more exciting sounding Power Pad.
  

  This, of course, led to games like Konami's seminal Dance Dance Revolution, which ushered in the age of the dance-mat as a legitimate and popular game controller. 2005 brought EyeToy: Kinetic to the market - the first modern motion tracking exercise game - while 2006 saw the short-lived and rather naffly titled Gamercize system wire actual exercise equipment up to games consoles.
  

  The rise of the Wii

  It was the Wii that really pulled all these ideas together to create the fitness game genre though. Indeed, it almost had to be Nintendo who would finally crack the nut and make gaming and exercise feel like natural bedfellows. The Wii was a friendly machine, and with titles like Wii Sports it had already made jumping around part of the gameplay experience. Here was a console where the all important mums and dads might buy into the idea of gaming to get healthy.
  

  

  With Wii Fit's balance board Nintendo finally had the peripheral to make it work, while the software cannily combined solid fitness goals with more accessible video game mechanics. Motivation is the key to any exercise regime, and video games are nothing if not efficient effort-to-reward systems. What better approach than to tap into our natural desire to beat our last score, to reach the next level, and to be congratulated for doing well?
  

  In the years following Wii Fit's 2007 release, the floodgates opened. Celebrity endorsed fitness packages aped Wii Fit's style, but without adding much to the genre. It was only when Sony and Microsoft got involved, with Move and Kinect, that there was enough competition to drive the development of even more advanced fitness games.
  

  Which brings us to today, and the chart-topping success of Zumba Fitness (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii). Based on the popular fitness franchise, it ditches the squats and thrusts in favour of more fun dance-based exercise. With its Latin rhythms and have-a-go simplicity, it's no surprise that it's selling so well – this is a fitness game disguised as a dancing game, which is then dressed up as a bloody good laugh. Perfect for people who might otherwise feel intimidated by the genre.
  

  EA Sports Active 2 (Wii, PlayStation Move and Xbox Kinect) goes in the complete opposite direction, with its wireless heart-rate monitor and resistance band accessory. This is the game for serious fitness nuts who really want to push themselves further with each new workout, with loads of stats and options to tweak your experience for maximum calorie-crushing impact.
  

  Similar in style, but slightly less ferocious in approach, is Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. This also concentrates on scalable aerobic workouts with an emphasis on personalised training routines and lots of encouragement to keep the pace up. For players who have taken Wii Fit as far as they can, both titles represent the obvious next step.
  

  Workouts are for wimps

  

  But what if this is all still a little too much like leotards and headbands? What if you're worried that doing star jumps in front of your console won't impress your hard mates? Well, that's why there's UFC Trainer (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii). This manly fitness game for manly men offers much the same workout results as other fitness titles - but in a style that makes you feel like you could kick a man's head through a wall. Heavy on the cardio and sparring, it offers an experience as tough as its name suggests. Unless you actually do fight in the UFC, we suggest you don't go steaming in, ready to show off with the hardest settings.
  

  It's doubtful that motion control is going anywhere soon, what with Wii U around the corner and the next Xbox likely to incorporate Kinect, so it seems that far from being a passing fad the fitness game is here to stay. Maybe the stereotype of the lardy wheezing gamer is finally coming to an end. Pass the leg-warmers.

• Wii Balance Board claims Guinness World Record

  Wii Balance Board claims Guinness World Record

  Nintendo's Wii Balance Board has claimed a place in the Guinness World Record book as the bestselling personal weighing device of all time.

  The popular peripheral shifted just over 32 million units between April 2008, when it was introduced alongside the revolutionary exercise game Wii Fit, and November 2010.

  Since then, gamers have snapped up millions more copies of Wii Fit and its follow-up Wii Fit Plus, bringing lifetime sales of the series to more than 40 million.

  The Wii Balance Board has been central to the appeal of the games, allowing the Wii to measure players' weight and track subtle shifts in their balance and body motions to enable a range of calorie-burning gameplay experiences.

  Many other games have gone on to use the Balance Board as an accessory, including similar titles like EA Sports Active, as well as non-fitness games such as Punch-Out!! and Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party.

  Nintendo's Laurent Fischer said: "The launch of Wii Fit with the Wii Balance Board revolutionised the way people got active at home, making it fun and easy to exercise in the comfort of their own living room."

  Published: 11/01/2012

• Get off the couch - GAME looks at fitness games

  
  

  

  Asthmatic Athletics

  The popular image of video games is that of a pastime requiring no more physical effort than a sofa slouch and nimble thumbs - along with a carb-heavy diet of pizza and sugary soda. The fast-track to a slow death from obesity, in other words.

  Fitness games fly in the face of that assumption, but they're not the recent invention many think they are. Even as far back as 1982, companies like Atari were looking at ways of connecting exercise bikes to a virtual reality under the codename Project Puffer. In 1986, Bandai released a control mat for the Nintendo Entertainment System which came with Family Fun Fitness, a suite of exercise games. Nintendo was so impressed, it bought the product and repackaged it as the more exciting sounding Power Pad.

  This, of course, led to games like Konami's seminal Dance Dance Revolution, which ushered in the age of the dance-mat as a legitimate and popular game controller. 2005 brought EyeToy: Kinetic to the market - the first modern motion tracking exercise game - while 2006 saw the short-lived and rather naffly titled Gamercize system wire actual exercise equipment up to games consoles.

  

  The Rise of the Wii

  It was the Wii that really pulled all these ideas together to create the fitness game genre though. Indeed, it almost had to be Nintendo who would finally crack the nut and make gaming and exercise feel like natural bedfellows. The Wii was a friendly machine, and with titles like Wii Sports it had already made jumping around part of the gameplay experience. Here was a console where the all important mums and dads might buy into the idea of gaming to get healthy.

  With Wii Fit's balance board Nintendo finally had the peripheral to make it work, while the software cannily combined solid fitness goals with more accessible video game mechanics. Motivation is the key to any exercise regime, and video games are nothing if not efficient effort-to-reward systems. What better approach than to tap into our natural desire to beat our last score, to reach the next level, and to be congratulated for doing well?

  In the years following Wii Fit's 2007 release, the floodgates opened. Celebrity endorsed fitness packages aped Wii Fit's style, but without adding much to the genre. It was only when SONY and Microsoft got involved, with Move and Kinect, that there was enough competition to drive the development of even more advanced fitness games.

  

  Which brings us to today, and the chart-topping success of Zumba Fitness. Based on the popular fitness franchise, it ditches the squats and thrusts in favour of more fun dance-based exercise. With its Latin rhythms and have-a-go simplicity, it's no surprise that it's selling so well - this is a fitness game disguised as a dancing game, which is then dressed up as a bloody good laugh. Perfect for people who might otherwise feel intimidated by the genre.

  EA Sports Active 2 goes in the complete opposite direction, with its wireless heart-rate monitor and resistance band accessory. This is the game for serious fitness nuts who really want to push themselves further with each new workout, with loads of stats and options to tweak your experience for maximum calorie-crushing impact.

  Similar in style, but slightly less ferocious in approach, is Your Shape: Fitness Evolved. This also concentrates on scalable aerobic workouts with an emphasis on personalised training routines and lots of encouragement to keep the pace up. For players who have taken Wii Fit as far as they can, both titles represent the obvious next step.

  

  Workouts Are For Wimps

  But what if this is all still a little too much like leotards and headbands? What if you're worried that doing star jumps in front of your console won't impress your hard mates? Well, that's why there's UFC Trainer. This manly fitness game for manly men offers much the same workout results as other fitness titles - but in a style that makes you feel like you could kick a man's head through a wall. Heavy on the cardio and sparring, it offers an experience as tough as its name suggests. Unless you actually do fight in the UFC, we suggest you don't go steaming in, ready to show off with the hardest settings.

  It's doubtful that motion control is going anywhere soon, what with Wii U around the corner and the next Xbox likely to incorporate Kinect, so it seems that far from being a passing fad the fitness game is here to stay. Maybe the stereotype of the lardy wheezing gamer is finally coming to an end. Pass the leg-warmers.

  Published: 10/08/2012

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