MTV Multiplayer has a pretty interesting article where they have a professional fitness trainer play Wii Fit and give his thoughts. Though I'm not a fitness trainer (at least not professionally), his thoughts on BMI and the senselessness of having a Wii Fit Age statistic in the game match up pretty closely with mine. The article is worth a read if you've been interested in Wii Fit.
As for me, I've been playing Wii Fit since Saturday and have been having a pretty good time with it. I've been trying to do it every morning, right after I wake up, as a means to sort of shake the cobwebs out and get the day started. So far I've dropped around six pounds, but I get the impression that that's a pretty standard deviation, based on how recently a person has eaten, and so on.
While we'll eventually post a more standard review with a score on it, Wii Fit needs to be put through its paces on a daily basis before I can really determine if it's any good. I'm actually having fun with it so far, and I've been slowly unlocking additional yoga poses, longer run distances, and stuff like that. The game seems to be at its best when you're actually doing something balance-related, since that's really all the board can measure. There's nothing in place to really let you know if you're doing the poses and exercises correctly, and the on-screen trainer isn't always as easy to emulate as it initially seems. You're supposed to be flexing specific muscles during some of these moves, and the game doesn't always convey that clearly.
Your Wii Fit Age is similarly crazy. If you've played the Brain Age games, you probably know that your "Brain Age" isn't really to be taken seriously, it's just a throwaway statistic based on how well you're doing, generally speaking. Porting that concept over to Wii Fit without any real explanation about what it means is weird, because it makes people think "oh, I have the body of an XX-year-old!" I started at 40, but after playing the game for two days, I was down to 29, just because I've gotten used to the sorts of activities that the game asks you to do.
Of course, any purchasing advice from me is going to be sort of useless, since Wii Fit seems to be selling out all over the place. The Best Buy near our office, which didn't do any sort of pre-orders, was sold out 20 minutes after opening on Wednesday. Either way, I'll probably check in periodically with more thoughts about the game. Right now, I'm having fun, but I get the impression that jogging on a mini-trampoline would be more effective and wouldn't take up much more space, either.
3 Comments