Wii Fit

My roommate has a Wii and recently got the Wii Fit game. I found this kind of amusing and made a note to give it a try some day if I found some free time. Today was that day.

i find the concept kind of self-contradictory. To my mind, the best way to get people active is to get them outside, while wii Fit tries to get them healthy by having them play a videogame. At one level I can appreciate that ok, the time they are going to spend playing this game is game they would have spent plaing another game, so this is better than nothing, but that's about it.

The game begins by asking for your age and height, then weighs you and tells you your BMI. BMI is a terrible number but, I suppose, better than nothing.

The game then asks you to set a goal, without giving you any guidance on whether the goal you're setting is reasonable or not.

From there, you get a series of games to play in 4 different areas. Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, Balance Games. The Yoga was fairly instructive, giving a decent intriduction to a couple of poses, then rating your execution based on your ability to balance on the Wii Balance Board (it's pretty sensitive) and giving you a score. This of course feeds the competitive fuel and you can shoot for higher scores to unlock more poses. the more time you spend 'laying' the more poses and other games you unlock as well. I'm not much of a Yoga person, I have enjoyed it when i tried it though and it seemed to be a pretty decent introduction to Yoga.

The Strength Training seemed to work much the same way. I didn't try the Aerobics game... there was a hula hoop looking game and I just couldn't bring myself to try them. The Balance Games were actually the first thing I tried and some of them were surprisingly tricky, others less so, but still got the competitive fire pumping (there is a ski jump game that was actually kind of fun, if simplistic).

Overall, like I said earlier, it's better than nothing, which is what a lot of people do, nothing. It's no replacement for a real workout but I could see it being a good gateway for someone to get into Yoga. Thinking back, having seen some people get pretty darn sweaty playing Dance Dance Revolution, you could probably get a decent aerobic workout from the Aerobic games. I hope it leads to more people going out to work out rather than leading more people to think "Oh, I'll just stay in and play video games for my workout instead".