You Have Lost!

Did you know that Wii Fit actually gets you working out before you’ve loaded it up? In fact, it gets you working out before you even get to your house. That’s because the Balance Board, its defining peripheral, is a surprisingly bulky piece of kit, and carrying it around doesn’t half burn those calories. I thought it was going to be kinda light and flimsy for some reason, but now that I think about it that doesn’t really make sense. Anyway, luckily I’d purchased (the last in-stock) Wii Fit at the local Sainsbury’s having been driven there by my girlfriend, so the exercise was limited to the walk between the car and the house. That plus was cancelled out by the embarrassing minus of having to go around Sainsbury’s with the obviously marked box in our trolley. I was half-expecting some chucklehead to come up to me and say, “Yep, looks like you need that,” or, “I think you’d better get two, mate,” or something even wittier. Happily, no-one did, but Wii Fit had that base covered within minutes of it booting up.

Much like Brain Training games, Wii Fit estimates an appropriate ’age’ for you when it loads up, all through a couple of tests and a weigh-in. You get your good self on the Balance Board and try to keep up with the incredibly precise balance tests; one test demands that you shift weight between your left and right side so that the weight balance stays within very small margins. When that’s over, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll watch your Mii nervously shuffle under a socio-referential spotlight before being told by the helpful Balance Board assistant that your Wii Fit age is just under 500 years more than your current one. Then as if to compound your misery you’ll get to watch your Mii swell to awful proportions to fit your apparently established Body Mass Index.

At this stage I was thinking, “So far… I’ve basically spent £70 to have an animated squeaky brick tell me that I’m a lardass. Great.” Thankfully my time with Wii Fit greatly improved, but I suppose it only could after the bloody thing humiliated me in my very own home. In fairness, I should really stop the negativity train right here because I’m actually quite impressed with Wii Fit based on my first impressions of it.

I like how one of the first things it does is ask you to set you a goal for your intended weight loss, an excellent way of encouraging you to be proactive and commit to improving yourself. I’m very much a goal-orientated person so to have a target, one which Wii Fit can tell me whether I’m making good headway towards or not, is a small but very important inclusion for me. In some ways this is one of the reasons why I knew I’d get on with Wii Fit in the long-term, and that’s because at its core the Balance Board is a scale with brains that connects to my TV and can help me keep track of my weight. I happen to think that’s pretty cool – ok, maybe not cool enough to justify the price tag, but it’s not the only thing Wii Fit has to offer.

The most fun I’ve had with Wii Fit has been with its balance games. They’re a collection of short mini-games that get you to shift your balance between left and right and front and back as appropriate. Of all of these, the ski-ing and the Labyrinth­-like ball-into-hole games proved the most entertaining, and pretty challenging too. The Labyrinth game, called Table Tilt, is particularly difficult. It starts out with your Mii falling from a great height down onto a platform, and just as it’s recovered it gets transformed into a ball with its visage on it. How messed up is that? That’s like Alice in Wonderland-like screwed-up. Once you’ve gotten over the shock of your Mii’s unexpected shapeshift it’s your duty to try and rescue them and other unfortunate Mii-balls by rolling them into holes. This is done by, you guessed it, tilting the platform. The kicker is that you tilt the platform by shifting your weight, and that’s not nearly as easy as it sounds. Talking of the integration of Miis, there’s probably not been a game on the system yet apart from Wii Sports that uses your Miis to such degree. It’s particularly amusing in the football-heading game, for example when my good friend Hairy Pete (I don’t know why he’s called that) kicked a shoe at me for the first time. All the games are pretty fun, but  whether they will do anything for me in terms of balance and posture is another matter for other people with more scientific knowledge.

The yoga, aerobic and muscle exercises on the other hand do have obvious benefits, and yet they’re nothing spectacular. The aerobic exercises so far have consisted of hula hooping, step aerobics and light jogging, although the latter doesn’t actually use the Balance Board. You just stick your Wiimote in your pocket and jog on the spot feeling a bit like a dimwit who’s glad to be doing this in the privacy of their household. The one game I’ve not really enjoyed is the step aerobics one; it just feels a bit too much like Dance Dance Revolution for retards. That’s not to say the rhythm is that easy to keep up with, because  it’s actually fairly challenging. It’s just that it uses music that wouldn’t be out of place in an elevator or in a Sims game. Having said that, I’m not sure how I could see myself seriously doing step aerobics to, say, a Foo Fighters or Killers tune. I guess I could try it. I’ll let you know how that goes.

As for the yoga and muscle activities, they play out like typical exercise videos, but with the degree of interactivity that that Balance Board offers by monitoring your weight distribution. For example, if you’re a bit shaky when trying to stand on one leg, the trainer will encourage you to try and keep yourself steady. At the end of the exercise the trainer then tells you how well you did based on your balance throughout. Obviously it can’t monitor how well you’ve positioned yourself for each pose,  but it demonstrates them to you as best it can and so far they haven’t been too hard to understand. They have however been pretty hard to keep up with for me, but that’s because I have all the flexibility of a statue. Seriously, I could actually feel my body shutting down during the Sun Salutation. I do like the yoga, even if it does feel like I’m missing an X chromosome when I’m doing it.

So, what is the most important thing that Wii Fit has going for it? The Balance Board is a neat piece of kit, and the exercises and games are fun and clever for the most part, but there’s no disguising that this product is not amazing or groundbreaking. Ultimately it’s a set of scales, very good scales admittedly, that connects to your Wii. Still, I can see myself using Wii Fit regularly, and the reason why and that ‘most important thing’ is the way it makes me feel. If I screw up a yoga pose the trainer looks at me with an air of slight disappointment before letting me know that I’m probably not up to doing that pose yet because I really suck. If my weight goes up the Balance Board demands to know why I’ve let things slip before telling me that I really suck. If I get a good enough score on the Ski Jump game then my Mii dances around happily and the music becomes upbeat, and then seconds later I’ll be informed that I still suck and how. This sense of competing with yourself is something that Nintendo have been cultivating in all their self-improvement games, and they’ve been very smart about ensuring these games don’t pull any punches with slackers. The spotlight on your Mii, your very own likeness, as it anxiously waits to hear its test results is the very epitome of this strict and almost nasty attitude. In many ways this gives the game a personality, as if it’s a personal trainer that lives in your sitting room silently judging you when you don’t use it. It plays very well into the current climate regarding obesity in the UK and US, and that social attitude and stigma will be the reason why Wii Fit will sell like crazy. A Wii game selling well, you say? Get outta town.

Anyway, so far I’ve been impressed. Not bowled over, no, but definitely impressed. Nevertheless, the retail price in the UK is way too high at £70. It should be more like £50. If you’re reading this and thinking about buying it then it’s really a matter of being honest with yourself and asking whether you’re actually going to use it. If you think it’s going to do all the hard work for you, make no mistake: Wii Fit will not make you lose weight. Eating better and exercising makes you lose weight. Wii Fit might help you to take the steps required to though, just like a good trainer would, and like a good trainer it will chart your progress and keep you on the right track. If the price is putting you off but you’re still interested, maybe go halfsies with your partner. When you lose weight and achieve Adonis levels of fitness you should invite your friends over and show them Wii Fit, and then you can sit next to the Wii and together silently judge their tubbiness. That or you could do something else. Maybe play an actual video game like Grand Theft Auto IV. That’s coming out kinda soon, right?

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