Quick review: Wii Fit Plus, 2 steps forward, 1 back

Wii Fit Plus is priced as an expansion pack to Wii Fit.  It includes a few new yoga and strength building exercises plus a fair number of balance games, some of which provide some aerobic benefit.

In terms of unalloyed goods, here’s what you get:

1. Estimated calorie tracking.  They aren’t tracking your pulse, so this is really a guess, but it’s still good to know the comparative burn rates of various exercises.  
2. Good new exercises and games.  I’m oddly enamored with the one where you flap your arms to fly a giant chicken avatar.  The handling is very tricky, but there’s just a cool level of immersion there.
3. A night owl option under user options, so that if you weigh in at 12:01 am you aren’t chided for missing a day.
4. A quick test button, for when you want to weigh in and get going.

So what about the one step back?  I had high hopes for “My Wii Fit Plus,” which is basically designed for the power users.  First and foremost, it allows things to go faster by cutting out a lot of the end of exercise commentary and allowing for swift transitions between exercises. You can work off existing routines, create your own, work with a more in depth favorites list that also tracks what you’ve done most recently and what you do most rarely.

So what are the problems:

1. You can’t set the number of reps for strength building exercises, it will always be the minimum possible.  You can select the same exercise twice or three times in a row, which helps, but it would have been fairly trivial to offer some options there.  I’d be content with just setting a switch somewhere for “minimum reps” vs. “maximum reps.
2. While the standard routines mix in aerobic and balance games the custom does not allow for it.  Also the standard routines mostly seem kind of on the easy side.
3. There’s only one custom routine, which is just a bad idea as I’m told there’s minimal benefit for strength building on the same muscle group for two days in a row.

I still am glad to have it, but I’ll probably also check out some of the competitors.  I doubt they’ll match the polish on Wii Fit Plus, but I hope they’ll be more focused on giving power-users options to help them get an efficient work out.