Are Wii Fit Yet? - My 200th Review!

I first heard about Wii Fit about a month before it came out. I'm not even sure that we had a Wii yet, but it was around the time that our house caught on fire and we decided to buy a Wii with our insurance money. I knew that this was a product that I should get. I really need to get working out.

Wii Fit is a little more expensive than most of your Wii games... $90! It does come with a brilliant new piece of equipment, the Wii Balance Board. You step on it, it weighs you (you can use it if you weight 330 pounds or less), and it will keep track of how much weight you put on each foot. It's not new technology, but this is the first time that I've ever seen it used in a video game. There are other games in development for use with the Wii Balance board, and you can also use the balance board with Wii Ski.

Starting Up

When you get started with Wii Fit, the game is going to want to know a few things about you. How tall are you? You don't have to tell it how much you weigh, the game will do that for you. It will want to know your birthdate as well, but your Mii might already have that information for you.

The Wii has a cute little balance board avatar that helps you. It will tell you good morning (or evening), ask you about your fitness habits, and give you some tips. After you tell it some things about yourself, it will weigh you. Now, if you're a little nervous about other family members knowing how much you weigh, you can password-protect that information so they can't access it. However, there is some information that they will see:

Your friends and family members will see your progress on a graph. Everybody starts out in the middle of the graph, whether they are obese or underweight. If you lose weight, the line graph will show your BMI going down, if you gain weight... they'll see that too.

Your Mii will reflect your BMI in the Wii Fit Plaza. Every day, after Wii Fit weighs you, your Mii will balloon from skinny... well, to however much you weigh. Your Mii will get a more rounded body until it hits your level, then say "That's Normal" or "That's Overweight" or "That's Obese". I'm sure it will say "That's Underweight" as well if you happen to be stick thin. Your friends will see your overweight Mii if you happen to be overweight... but then again, unless you're a body builder, they probably don't think you're a Skinny Minny anyway.

The Daily Body Test

The Wii will give you a daily progress report if you weigh in every day. It will weigh you, and will subtract pounds based on the weight of the clothes that you tell it you are wearing. It is more accurate than my bathroom scale, giving you a measurement to the tenth of a pound.

Your Wii Balance Board friend will ask you if you want to set a goal to lose weight. The maximum weight it will allow you to set a goal to lose at one time is 22 pounds. It will ask you what time period you want to lose that weight in as well.

If you told it you want to lose weight, but you gain weight, it will ask you why you think you gained weight. I don't know what the criteria is, because some days it will ask, and other days it will not. They don't give you too many choices; they do include an "I don't know" response, but not an "other" response. I weighed myself immediately after a trip to the salad bar, and ended up weighing more because of the weight of the food. "I just ate" or "I just drank 1/2 gallon of water" are not choices, so you'll just have to say "I don't know" and the balance board might decide to lecture you on calories. Somewhat annoying.

After the Wii weighs you, you can continue, and it will randomly choose 2 tests out of several to assess your balance, steadiness, agility, etc. From there it comes up with your Wii Fit age, which can range from 1 to 99. You hope to get your age or younger, even if you're 6 (getting a Wii Fit age of 14 when you are 6 is not good).

The Games

Although Wii Fit is a great tool to record your progress, it also has a lot of fun games (which is why you bought it, right?). There are four categories of games: yoga, strength, aerobics, and balance.

When you first start playing, you will be given a Fit Bank. It's a cute little piggy-bank that will count how many minutes/hours you have been playing Wii Fit games, both on a daily basis and total minutes. When you hit 10 hours, the bank changes color. I'm not sure if it changes color again when you hit 20 hours, I'm at 18 hours and haven't found out yet. The more minutes you get on your fit bank, the more games you unlock.

Yoga games include your basic moves like sun salutation, warrior, chair pose, palm tree, and also harder moves like dance and shoulder stand. There are some good stretches in here as well. I usually tend to move towards these because doing them makes me feel like I've done a good workout.

Strength games include plank, push-up and side plank (they don't have push-ups by themselves, which I wish they did), jackknives (which I had never done before but I really like, they really work on your core muscles), tricep extensions, and more. Once you have done a move a few times, there is usually a harder version that you can unlock. I managed to do the 30 second plank, then they unlocked a 60 second version (tough) and even a 90 second version that I won't even try.

There are aerobics games that are pretty fun as well, like hula hoop and super hula hoop (a longer version), a virtual run around the island (that you can do with your friend, as there is a 2 player mode), rhythm boxing, and two levels of step. There is a free step too, which is pretty cool, because you can set it for a certain length of time, and your Wii-mote will count time for you while you watch the news. The Rhythm Boxing has a longer version that you can unlock.

The balance games are pretty fun, but they don't seem to have the same degree of difficulty as the other games. There is a ski jump, ski slalom, snowboarding, table tilt, a game where you have to hit soccer balls with your head (and dodge other items), and more. While I did notice that doing 50 ski jumps in a row (to try to beat my husband's then-record) got my muscles tired, a few times at these games neither made me work up a sweat, nor got my muscles aching the next day. But they were fun, and a lot more active than sitting on your bum and working out your thumbs.

Competition

Wii Fit has a way of encouraging competition. In most of the games, it tells you who had the top 10 scores. When we first got our Wii Fit, everybody in the family was trying to see whether they could beat the other person's score in the ski jump, or get more points in soccer, etc. After you've been playing for a while, the scores of some people can become difficult to beat. If you're not good enough to catch up to the top 10 that your friends and family have achieved, it will track your personal best for you, to try to beat that.

Wii also facilitates friendly encouragement. The Balance Board avatar will ask you if so-and-so looks like they're getting more toned, or will mention that "I've noticed that I haven't seen Nana lately..."

Final Thoughts

I love my Wii Fit. I can get a great yoga/strength workout here, and if I was more into aerobics, I could get a nice sweat with the hula hoop and boxing. I've lost about 2 pounds, I think, in 2 months... but my flexibility has greatly increased, and my husband says I look more toned. My husband is not able to touch his toes, and I've noticed that he's gained more flexibility and has gotten closer to this goal as well. Perhaps if you were really athletic it might not be too difficult, but it's good for me. It gets used more than any other game at our house.