I know I'm probably in the minority here at Dtoid but I've been looking forward to WiiFit, so when I got the call to come pick it up I did so.



Well it's here. WiiFit and the Wii Balance Board have arrived in the US and are prepped to take America by storm. For just $89.99 you too can have your Wii tell you that you're overweight. Is this the end of gaming as we know it or a wonderful new way to get everyone involved in the pastime. I'm gong to save my full review of WiiFit the "game" for later once I've used it for a week or so and actually exercised with it on a regular basis. But I will tell you all about the board and my initial interaction with the game. The good, the bad and the ridiculously pale. Oh, and just in case you weren't convinced that Nintendo had infiltrated almost every corner of the earth, when I was walking out of the mall with my big WiiFit box I was stopped twice to ask where I had gotten the board, once by a attractive forty-something woman who said she had been looking forward to its release and the second time by an man who was probably pushing 60.

After dealing with rush hour traffic and wondering if the outside of the Wii Board box could have possibly been anymore PC since it features multiple sexes, ages, heights and hairstyles, I got home and carefully opened my new toy. Normally I rip into things without a worry for the packaging but the built in handle and heft of the box made me think I should treat this with a bit more care. Then there it was, a white and gray board about a foot and half across with a line down the center. Popping it on the floor I went about setting it up.

The Board



The board itself feels incredibly sturdy as I suppose it has to be for people to be standing and leaning on it constantly but I had been worried since in my mind Nintendo is only 50/50 on their extra Wii controllers - the zapper being a piece of flimsy plastic crap and the wheel actually feeling good and sturdy. No worries with the board though. It's heavy but not too heavy and clearly meant to be stepped all over as it doesn't feel like it's going fall apart if you shove it around a little. I wouldn't throw it at a wall or anything but even if you did the wall might lose. The top of the board actually feels quite comfortable on your bare feet with two rougher areas for you fit to stand on on either side of the platform, though the white coloring leads to one realizing just how dirty their feet are after wearing flip flops all day. The foot and half width is plenty wide for any stance I would suppose but the length is not for people with big feet. I wear a size 13 (in the US) shoe and my toes and heels were running over the raised parts of the board before the edge. Not over the edge, mind you, but the bump was a enough to be a bit uncomfortable. Luckily it's WiiFit so you're moving your feet and legs pretty often and I never got to the point where I needed to step off the board from discomfort. Also of note are the four plastic pads that you can screw on to the Wii Board in order to raise the platform higher in case you are playing on a carpet. The bottom of the board needs to be off the groundevidently in order to measure balance.

The board runs on four triple A batteries which was a surprisingly small amount in my mind for something that seems to be doing a lot of electronic stuff but I guess if you think about it it's just doing a Wii Remote's job but with a scale instead of motion sensors. Thankfully Nintendo is kind to us gamers and included four batteries in the box. After popping them in I assumed, since I'm an intelligent gamer and don't need to read manuals, that I'd just hit the sinc button next to the batteries and then the one on my Wii. So I did just that and waited watching the blinking light on the Wii Boards power button, which is conveniently located in a place you can turn on with your foot. It blinked and the blinked some more. So I tried to sync again. Nothing. "Ha!," I thought, "I'm going to tear Nintendo a new one for this." Well, I can't since it was my own fault. You have to have a game that uses the Wii Board in your Wii in order to sync it. In fact if I had bothered to insert WiiFit into my Wii I would have been prompted once I started up the game to sync my board. I did do this and the board synced up quickly and easily. I was prepared to exercise with a Nintendo Console, a thing I had never even dreamed of doing.

WiiFit



WiiFit fits easily into the rest of Nintendo's Touch Generation games. The design features tons of white and the pleasant music that we've come to expect from the Nintendo Channels and more 'casual' games. When you first turn the game on you're welcomed by an anthropomorphic Wii Board who jumps up and greets you brightly. While most of the board's speech is in text it does count and utter one syllable words in what is possibly the most annoyingly cute voice in the world. I kept on looking down at my board and thinking that it wouldn't sound anything like that. The board begins by explaining that balance between the upper and lower body is very important to living a healthier life and that if you don't have good posture and good balance you're going to become fatter and you'll probably die a horrible lonely death because no one loves you. All right, it may not be that harsh but if you have body issues you might want to ease your way into picking up the game since it is going to be brutally honest. After the lecture on health you do the normal set-up stuff for Nintendo games of this style. Choose your Mii, tell it your age and make sure the date is right.

After this the board will want to test you to find your WiiFit Age, your BMI (Body Mass Index), your weight and how well you keep your center of gravity (OK, I've got the game on as I'm typing this and the creepy living Wii board is wandering around in the background of the menu screen. I've really never seen something so cute and yet so terrifying at the same time.).After this, or actually this entire time, the game is really going to remind you of Brain Age. In Brain Age you do an intro test and it grabs your stats from those. Same with WiiFit. It takes all your information, measures your weight and balance and then announces you out of shape and ugly. Fine! Maybe, I'm just bitter because my BMI was 25.47, which is overweight. Bear in mind I'm six foot and weigh 188.1 pounds. Normal people would not call this overweight but having looked it up on the internet it actually, medically is. Anyway, I should lose ten pounds basically which is probably a good idea, but more on that later.

The living Wii Board is actually a little too nice for my liking. I got the feeling it was mocking me it was so nice. The game also made my Wii's belly fatter when I was labeled overweight which was actually a nice touch. I wouldn't normally mention these things but since this is a game about fitness it's worth a mention. Anyway, now that you're ready the game leads you to your calendar where you can put a stamp on the date for completing the test (which you're supposed to take daily) and keep track of everything. You also need to set a goal for yourself for your target BMI and what amount of time you want to accomplish this goal in. It suggested I get my BMI down to 22 but that would have meant losing 20 pounds, putting me at 168, which didn’t seem like to much fun so I decided to go for ten pounds in two months which seemed to me like a healthy goal, unlike the ten pounds in two weeks that the WiiFit originally had it set for. You’re allowed to alter and change your goal every two weeks in case you miscalculated how fast you’d lose the weight. Once I had this set it was time to get going.

Exercise



I hesitate to actually call this exercise but then again I did break a sweat and some of the strength training exercises could offer up a challenge once you can open up more reps and difficulties. You start off by choosing a personnel trainer, either male or female, both of whom have white skin. Like vampire white, not Caucasian white. I tried working with the male instructor first but found him far too creepy and odd looking so I switched over to the female instructor, who in my opinion has much better people skills than that arrogant male trainer who thinks he’s god's gift to man kind in his tight fitting shirt. You’re also introduced to your piggy bank. For every minute of exercise you do you receive a coin and coins unlock more exercises and games.

There are four categories of exercise to choose from: yoga, strength training, aerobics and balance games. Plus a favorites section that allows you see your top ten favorite work outs. Yoga and strength training are actual workouts that you do with the trainer leading you. Yoga works on stretching the body and strength training on exercising it. If you work out regularly you’ll know most of the strength training moves that are open at the start. The only one I had trouble with was the push up into a side plank which moved a little fast for me. In fact if you’re completely out of shape the trainers might move a little too fast when they’re doing their motions for any of the workouts, but I guess that is part of the challenge. Despite each exercise and yoga movement being explained to me before the first time I tried the exercise some took some practice to keep up with. Everything is centered around keeping your balance and keeping centered while performing the movements. In all honesty I could actually see this helping a lot of people. It’s pretty fun and super easy to just get up and do.

The aerobics and balance games are a bit more gamer friendly. Both use your Miis instead of the trainers and task you with doing fun things like hula hooping or blocking soccer balls with your head. I think the Ski Jump was my biggest surprise so far. To set the record straight, my feet at the moment do not have the type of coordination needed to play video games. One day they may, but not now. If I hadn’t been learning all the movements I would say you could get a pretty good workout done in under an hour. With the exercises open in the beginning you won’t be doing anything that pushes your body too hard but doing anything is really better than nothing.

Other Things



After going through all the exercises I decided to retest myself and see if my WiiFit age had changed at all. I was originally 43 when I first turned the game on. By the time I had trained I dropped down to 27 and lost half a pound. At first I was a little perplexed and upset that the board had been so off but when I thought about it I realized I had never really played video games with my feet before other than a few rounds of DDR here and there. So my initial age was based on my times spent before I learned what I was doing. There learning curve for the board and WiiFit is small but it is there. Also the first time I did it I wasn’t paying attention to my balance at all the second time it was forefront in my mind as it is right now and probably will be tomorrow. So I guess it worked.

One annoying factor of working out is that you need space. I don't have that big an apartment and I didn't really position my television, table and couch with having to do push ups in mind. So people might be finding themselves rearranging their furniture with this one as most gamers abodes probably aren't designed around to much physical movement. On the other hand Nintendo really wants working out to be as easy as possible. I know I'll personally make up a million excuses not to work out from wanting to play video games to the gym being too far away. I was sure that at some point when I had a different game in my Wii I would be to lazy to get up to switch it to work out. Thankfully, I guess, there is the WiiFit Channel which allows you access to a limited version of WiiFit. No excuses there I guess.

I don’t want to go into to much detail on my full opinion of everything as there are plenty more exercise to unlock and things to do but as for right now color me intrigued and impressed. I’ll tell you if I’m still interested in a week. If you're asking yourself if this thing will really work well we'll have that answer for you too as I'll be putting my stats and progress up for the world to see. But more on that tomorrow I need to go look like an idiot pretending to hula hoop.