A blog of my computer game habit.

10th February 2010

Post with 3 notes

Wii Fit Plus : Wii

Those of you who followed my Pound-A-Day feed will know that I spent many hours in January playing Wii Fit Plus. I’m still doing so daily and, with 180 or so hours spent between the original Wii Fit and the Plus version, it now ranks up with the Final Fantasy games in terms of hours played. By the end of this year, I have little doubt that Wii Fit and Wii Fit Plus will be the game I have played most ever; quite a sobering thought.

I doubt there is anyone able to read this who hasn’t heard of Wii Fit; if you are one of them, pop over and read my short review of the first game and pop back here when you are done. There - now we all know what it is about. So what about Wii Fit Plus, what exactly is ‘plus’ about it?

At first glance, the plus part is a let down. Not in terms of value for money; after all, it’s under twenty quid for all the extras, but in terms of what they could have done. There’s a new section which holds fifteen new games, and there’s ‘My Wii Fit Plus’ which allows you to build customisable routines but that’s about all. On the good side, it does replace Wii Fit seamlessly, keeping your hours played, weight progress and all other statistics neatly so you don’t have to worry about losing anything by replacing the first game with this (something I hope they continue if they do a Wii Fit II). It also unlocks anything you didn’t have unlocked, something I wouldn’t have noticed if it were not for Alicia playing and now being able to have a go at the Penguin game, something she couldn’t do earlier because she hadn’t played enough Yoga and Weights from the first game (yup, that’s a serious flaw in Wii Fit, that you need to do Yoga to unlock a silly side game where you dress up as a penguin, thus meaning that kids can’t just have fun… anyway, fixed now). So it replaces the Wii Fit disc and you’ll never take the old one out again, simple.

The new games are quite fun for the most part. The problem is that it doesn’t really add anything to the getting fit part of Wii Fit with these new games. There isn’t a new aerobic exercise to augment the three main ones from the first game (hula hoop, step, jogging) and if you are trying to lose weight, then it is these that you concentrate on. There’s a cycling game which is quite nice but doesn’t have the calorie burn of either hula or jogging, but that’s all on the aerobic side. Shame. I’d like to have seen something mean I didn’t feel the need to do maxed out hula hooping every day just to get my heart moving. These plus games really are a mix of new balance games and some of them are just a bit poor; ‘perfect 10’, I’m talking to you. This game has you wiggling your arse in an attempt to hit the numbers to add up to 10 (or 15, or 20, depending on your level). Problem is, it’s about as accurate as trying to play basketball with a fish. I can count to ten just fine, in fact, I’ll blow my trumpet enough to say I can count to ten very very well, but according to Wii Fit, I’m merely average and often I fail. According to Wii Fit Plus, I think that out of 8,2 and 7, for example, I just need to hit that seven again and again and again. Weak. It’s not all bad though, the kung fu game really feels edgy and works best if you produce tight kung-fu-esque moves, the obstacle course is genuinely fun and the skateboarding is great (oh, and despite my early comments, does aid in getting your heart-rate up). Most of the new games though are just a variation in what we’ve seen before and while that’s no bad thing if you are doing this every day, they don’t really add much, they just relieve monotony.

The crux of Wii Fit Plus for me though, is getting fitter. There’s a feature to design a routine and chain events together to make one long sequence and though I was quite dismissive of this at first (mainly because it uses the lowest setting for each event and doesn’t let you add more reps, which is annoying) it is actually the best way to play the game. It varies what you are doing, makes you use sections of the game you might otherwise overlook, and breaks the monotony of doing the same thing day after day which was probably the reason I ended up stopping doing the original game. This also leads me onto my favourite feature; the calorie counter. It’s an estimate, and it doesn’t allow you to set it in any realistic way (for example, you can’t say ‘I want to burn 500 calories’, instead you have to set it to ‘a chocolate bar’ which it estimates at 412 or something. I don’t want a stupid number Wii Fit Plus, I want a nice round one… who cares if there isn’t a foodstuff with exactly 500 calories?!) but what the calorie counting does do is make you stay playing the game for longer and longer sessions. With Wii Fit, the only thing that had you staying was the timer saying ‘you’ve done 30 mins today’. Trouble is, 30 mins is nothing (especially with exercise this light) and so if that’s the only achievement it has to offer, you tend to end up with really ineffective workouts. Wii Fit Plus has you burning that chocolate bar every day which amounts to closer to 80 minutes a day: much better.

As I said at the start, I play this a lot, and I just know there’s likely to be a second Wii Fit, so I thought I’d spend the time making public everything I think they need to change for it and list it here, just in case some bodkin from Nintendo takes a look (we can live in hope!). Before I write my list, I thought in closing I’d just say that I do think Wii Fit Plus is a must own bit of software (it’s not really a game is it?) for everyone with a Wii, even those who think that they are fit, just to remind people to get off their fat arses. For me, it’s an essential part of every day and has justified the price of a Wii, a balance board and all that in of itself.

Onto my list then, Mr Nintendo, this is what Wii Fit 2 needs to do:

  1. Have the option to turn the music off and leave the sound effects on. This is basic in most games and missing in a game which would benefit so much from it. Dumb that it isn’t there at the moment.
  2. Have an additional peripheral to measure your heartbeat or other information to provide more statistics and give proper calorie counts. [Yup, that’s what the finger thing is going to be for…]
  3. Have at least two new aerobic games, preferably ones with >5.0 MET scores.
  4. Allow you to alter the reps on all exercises when planning Fit Plus routines.
  5. Allow you to set targets properly (number of calories, number of minutes etc.) rather than ‘calories by food’ etc.
  6. Continue to count calories once the target is met.
  7. Allow you to plan a sequence of aerobic activities without needing to go back to the Wii remote.
  8. ‘Free Hula Hoop’
  9. Ability to turn the trainers completely off and just chain the routines without any pausing or interruption.
  10. Some sort of trophy or achievement beyond the current shiny toaster thing. I got nothing for passing 100 hours of use, some sort of recognition would have been nice even if it were to say ‘oh, you passed 100 hours, cool’.
  11. Ability to set weekly routines (for example, day heavy in aerobic activity followed by day heavy in Yoga etc.) to follow for an entire week.
  12. Online leaderboard and ability to see high scores without performing the task.
  13. More data analysis (for example, get it to tell you your average weight loss per week, or chart your progress at Tree in yoga etc.).
  14. Lots more step routines, including longer and faster ones.
  15. And my favourite one, a mixed routine obstacle course race - ‘run to here, do 1000 hula hoops, then run to here, get bicycle, cycle to here getting these flags, do the following step sequence, cycle to here, header 200 points worth of footballs, run to here, skateboard in the area to get 80 points’ etc. It’d be awesome.

Tagged: Wii

  1. tekkani posted this