Quick review: Wii Fit Plus, 2 steps forward, 1 back
October 15, 2009
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.