Wii Fit: More Intensity Please

Filed in archive Features on August 14, 2008

Image by Rob Howard for House of Nintendo

I have posted before how I was more skeptical than usual about Wii Fit. "Yet another peripheral," I thought, and I wasn't entirely confident that its "fitness awareness" focus would satisfy my workout needs. After all, the product promises to offer "one stop shopping" for fitness and health: A program that you'd use every day, aided by the Wii Fit Channel (that doesn't need the disc in the console to use) for simple BMI checks.

I went ahead and bit the bullet, despite the chronic shortages so emblematic of anything Nintendo releases. After all, I have my loyal readers to inform!

Wii Fit sells itself to you very well. Like all of Nintendo's new products, it is extremely ergonomic and friendly. It'll guide you through your first balance tests like the most friendly nurse you've ever worked with. I have to give Nintendo credit: they are masterful at creating a sort of white and blue utopian world, a place where everything will be quite fine if you follow the friendly suggestions of little cartoon characters.

Like any cool well built technology, you'll have an initial period where you'll be blown away by the hardware. The Wii Balance board is well built and quite sensitive. It's impressive, period. It takes a good deal of practice to get used to that sensitivity (use your oblique muscles, not your legs, to shift your weight!).

However, the product is not at all perfect. In fact, I think for certain segments of people, Wii Fit might miss the mark completely. its main issue is, like I feared, the intensity and variety of workouts, particularly for people who prefer aerobic exercise. So let's look at those.

The aerobic exercises consist of Step Aerobics, The Hula Hoop Toss, Running in Place, and Step Boxing. There are more difficult variants that you unlock as well. The Hula Hoop toss and Step Boxing outclass the other exercises, while Step Aerobics falters in its use of generic, canned music. Step Boxing, in my opinion, makes the most out of the Wii Controls, making great use of the motion controls of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk while cleverly combining them with the balance board.

The rest of the package is divided up into Yoga and Strength exercises. The Yoga is particularly good. Those who are interested in that sort of exercise will dig how the balance board will accurately judge your balance. The strength exercises are fine, but they are sort of smoke and mirrors: there is nothing that the technology does here that makes this any better than just picking up a step aerobics board at your local sporting goods store.

The main issue is that you run out of things to do quickly, and the things you do have are very low intensity- rarely will this game make the reasonably in shape person out of breath, even for short spurts. Of course, aerobic exercise by definition cannot get too hard, but one should have to breathe deeply, and many of these workouts hit what has to be the very bottom end intensity scale.

That isn't to say that you won't sweat, and you do, in fact, get a workout. But for a product that is really designed for use in short spurts (I really don't see how anyone can muster more than 30 minutes in one sitting), it doesn't provide you with ways to maximize those short workout intervals.

In my opinion, the reason for Wii Fit's popularity is that it sells an image and a promise, like so many fitness products. Like the system which bears its name, Wii Fit promises to revolutionize fitness, making it easy, intuitive, and fun. I think it succeeds in ease and to a lesser degree fun, but I'm not sure how well it achieves, well, the "fit" part. Don't get me wrong: any exercise at all is far better than none, and out of shape people, even myself, will benefit from using the product. But it isn't a magical cure all, and it isn't even, in my final judgement, the absolute best use of the Wii Balance Board and controller technology for simulating physical exercise routines.

So was this a waste of $90? Is this going to be like the Power Pad and other failed attempts to integrate a novel new device to a system? Thankfully, all the early evidence says no. First, Wii Fit is selling extremely well. Secondly, there is already more software coming than the Power Pad ever saw: the already released Wii Ski, Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum, and EA's EA Fitness. Finally, Wii Music uses the balance board in its simulation of a drum kit.

But for fitness goes, I'll continue to use Wii Fit, but I'm really looking forward to other, third party attempts at fitness software, that incorporates a more Western approach- less emphasis on Yoga and more on calorie burning, intense aerobic workouts.

Read IGN.com's Wii Fit review.