Ubidays 08: My Weight Loss Coach impressions

9:51 PM on 05.28.2008   |   Hamza CTZ Aziz

14 comments

Easily my biggest surprise from Ubidays was My Weight Loss Coach for the Nintendo DS. When the game was first announced, I never gave it a second thought. I figured it was going to be some kind of quick and simple Brain Age meets Wii Fit type game.

As it turns out, there's a lot more to My Weight Loss Coach than I had originally assumed. The game isn't focusing on players to just go work out every day. It's about changing the little things in a your daily life to help create better habits for yourself. Hit the jump to learn more about this unique little title.

[Editor's note: Sorry for the lack of photos everyone. Something is screwing with the file Ubisoft provided. Best I could do was find this video preview of the game on YouTube. Don't let the wall of text scare you please.] 

I'm the kind of guy that likes to let stuff pile up until it gets to the point of being unbearable. I tend to let my laundry pile up on the ground right next to my laundry basket. Sometimes I don't bother cleaning my bathroom for a month ... or three. And don't even get me started on how disgusting my car is looking at the moment.

It doesn't help that laziness seems to be in my genes. If you were to ever meet my father's side of the family, you'd swear they were some of the laziest people around. At the same time, my mom's side of the family is filled with hard workers that are far from lazy. With me, I want to clean stuff up, but I'm just too damn lazy to act on my desire. Maybe I'm making excuses with the whole genes thing, but being stuck in this weird middle limbo is really annoying.

With something like My Weight Loss Coach, I could possibly turn my laziness completely around with enough dedication. The goal with this game is to get people into better habits. It wants you to get more physical exercise, eat healthier and change your general habits up on a daily basis. Ubisoft worked with specialist in various health fields to ensure that what you will do in this game will be easy and fun to do.

When you start up a new game, you simply need to enter your weight, height and age. From there, the game will calculate your Body Mass Index and will let you know whether you should loss weight, gain weight or just try and maintain where you're at. Things will hopefully change for you as you progress and you can change your weight details as needed.

At the start of the game, you want to go to the Daily Session section. In a day, you have to try and meet four challenges: Walk 6,000 steps, complete at least one of the game challenges, do 30 minutes of exercise and have a perfect balance with the food you eat during your day. The game will come with a pedometer that you can actually plug into the GBA slot of your Nintendo DS. You don't have to use this specific pedometer and you can always enter your data manually. The game will track how many steps you take throughout your play through and will reward you with real life milestones. One example is the Great Wall of China milestone where your total walking distance has become what it would take to walk the Great Wall of China.

One of the requirements for the Daily Session is doing a challenge. You can do a max of six challenges a day and you will have over 700 challenges to do in the game. These challenges are little life tasks such as cleaning your car, cleaning out your fridge, and so on. Once you accept a challenge, you'll have 24 hours to complete it.

When you do the physical exercise requirement, you will need to input into the game what you did during the day (such as swimming, martial arts, etc) and for how long you did it. The game will have this cute little animation representing the information you just entered such as having the character in the game swim in a pool. 

The final part of the Daily Session has you telling the game what you ate throughout the day. The game has a big selection of foods to choose from and it will automatically calculate the calories for you. You can also input the data in directly; you just need to know the calorie number.

The second section to the game is called the Backpack. The Backpack will have all the tools needed to help you out in your Daily Session, divided up into a few categories.

In the Coaching session, the game will ask you about all of your daily habits to see what kind exercise the game should be giving you. So if you're the type of guy that's always behind a computer desk, it will suggest to you to do more physical activities.

The Backpack will also contain a trivia game with over 300 questions. It'll have questions such as what food doesn't belong to true and false style questions. All the questions can be reviewed afterwards for players to study. You'll also have a tips and facts page about foods and other health related things. There will be 160 of these all aimed at helping you to be a better person. There will also be a section with your weight and B.M.I. history, graphs of your progress, and a page of all of your milestone collections.

I will definitely be picking this game up once it comes out. It holds a lot of potential and it could be what I need to get myself onto a better path. My Weight Loss Coach will be out later this year and will retail for $29.99 with the pedometer attachment.