Wii Fitt-ing

Well folks, the Wii Fit was released yesterday, and guess who's the first to have one. Well, the first one to have one that didn't pre order that is. It was a bit tricky but I tracked down a lot at Target and made my way over there yesterday morning. As I put it in my cart the price clerk kinda congratulated me on getting one. Though I hear some people bought 4 later on in the day, hrm, probably making it tough for people like my mother-in-law to get one any time soon.

So, knowing it requires a lot of floor space, we came home and cleaned and vacuumed the living room. Then we set it up and put the game disk in.

Nintendo has put out a lot of stupid kid games. But I have to say, Wii Fit is not one of them. Nintendo has made a family friendly, fun tool for families to keep track, work on and maintain fitness levels. When Wii Sports was first released, there was disagreement on whether or not you can get exercise with the Wii. That argument is finally put to rest with Wii Fit. After just 30 minutes of logged Wii Fit training time, Kenny was breaking a sweat and he even commented that he felt like he got more of a work out from Wii Fit than the bike ride home.

A Walk Through-
After selecting your Mii from the Wii Fit Plaza. The Wii balance board takes several readings of weight and balance and requests your height age and the weight of your clothing, then it calculates your BMI and gives you a Wii age. From there you can set goals, ie. loosing or gaining weight.

There are several training programs available such as Yoga, Aerobic, Strength and Balance. And Wii Fit has you to select a "personal" trainer who gives instruction on the exercises and through the use of the balance board and sometimes the wii remote your trainer is able to let you know if you are keeping good balance through yoga positions or keeping up with the rest of the joggers on the Wii Fit Island Track.

Wii Fit logs your activity in game and it allows you to enter any exercise you do out of game like cycling, swimming, mowing the lawn or even doing the laundry. It keeps track of your training and BMI and you can see it plotted on a graph to let you know how you're doing on your goals.

Wii Fit also has a guest feature so guests can try out just the training sections without having to create a Wii Fit account. There is a wide selection of training activities. Some are fun for kids and some are... well strength training and yoga, which are fun for the adults. It's actually pretty fun trying to see if you can do the positions correctly and "beat" either your score or someone else's.

Wii Fit has a channel that you can go into without the game disk in. This allows you to quickly check stats and see how everyone or yourself is doing either in training everyday or with weight goals. There is also an account lock feature so that you can weigh yourself in private and lock up that info so others can't see.

Things I wish it had/did:

I wish it was usable for heavier people With a weight limit of 330 (a whole 30lbs more than the Japanese version) There isn't much hope for the many obese Americans out there who could really benefit from such a home fitness game. OPTIONS: If your family has the game and you cannot use the balance pad, you could go in as a guest and do most of the exercises (not on the pad). Running just involves the wiimote in a pocket to measure the footsteps. And you could make a goal of less than 330 so that you CAN play Wii Fit.

I wish it was friendlier to multi player activity While the Wii Fit makes a huge deal about exercising with friends and family, switching between accounts each time is somewhat annoying, can they make a tag team feature or something like that. Also it'd be nice to jog with a friend or hook up another balance board and hula hoop together.

Those things aside, I think the Wii Fit is fabulous. Does it have the staying power, unlike the treadmill collecting laundry in your living room? I think so. It has a strong incentive to check back everyday and see if your graph has changed, and to see if you can beat your score high score. And Involving everyone in the living room is a huge bonus making exercising a fun family activity instead of the isolating experience that it used to be.

***UPDATE***
Ainsley just unlocked a feature so that you can have a friend run with you, though "friend" doesn't get the auto track of the game you can add it I suppose in the outside activity log.