Hands — and feet — on with “Wii Fit”

A few days ago I received a review copy of Wii Fit, the new exercise game for Nintendo’s video game console. The kit consisted of the game disc and a surprisingly heavy “balance board” about two feet by one foot and some three to four inches thick.

Some quick background for those unfamiliar with the product: Wii Fitis probably the biggest mass-market game from Nintendo since the introduction of the Wii itself. In fact, “game” is probably too narrow a word for it. “Entertainment product” is closer. ”Exertainment” – which is somehow both more concise and clunky — is even closer.

The Wii Fitbalance board is essentially a fancy digital scale with a wireless link to the Wii. The game disc contains more than 40 activities in the following categories: aerobics, strength training, yoga, and balancing. You stand on the board and follow the on-screen instructor through the activities. The Wii keeps track of your progress, charts your BMI and makes suggestions. Think of it as Jane Fonda for digital generation.

I’d seen demos of the product and had expected it to bear about as much resemblance to actual exercise as Wii Sports (in which a flick of the wrist translates into a full tennis swing) bore to actual athletics.

Boy, I was wrong. 

Now, I’m not the picture of perfect health or anything, but I like to think I’m reasonably fit for my 37 years. I run several times a week and pump a bit of iron at the gym when I can. So I was expecting my first “Wiikout” to more or less be a cakewalk.

I had set up my profile the night before, inputing age, height, etc., and being run through a short series of tests to check my balance and determine my “Wii Fit age”. The balance board is supposed to be a pretty accurate scale, but it puts me at about 10 pounds below what our home scale and the scale in my gym say. It did get Harlan’s weight within a pound or two, though.

The next night I decided to try a fairly complete workout, sampling two activities from each of the four categories.

I started with an aerobic warmup to get the blood flowing. The first one was a Hula Hoop (the things are trademarked by Wham-O, hence the caps) exercise in which you stand on the board and rotate your hips in a circle. On screen, my Mii (the personal cartoon avatar you set up when you first get your Wii console) started working the hoop while a counter tracked how many rotations I pulled off. Every once in a while, other Mii a short distance away would toss additional hoops my way, requiring me to lean to the side to catch them with my Mii’s body.

The second activity was a short run. In this one, you step off the balance board and put the motion-sensitive Wii remote in your pocket or just hold it in your hand. As you run in place, it senses your cadence and propels your Mii forward. According to the Wii Fit manual, there is a whole island to explore on your runs, though your Mii only runs on set courses that are unlocked the more you run.

As I mentioned before, I run often and don’t have a problem cranking through a 5-miler. So as I felt my heart rate rise and the sweat start to bead, it dawned on me that there might be something to this after all. You definitely use different muscles running in place — I bounced on the balls of my feet, and the next day my soles felt a little tender from the uncustomary stretching.

Definitely warmed up at this point, I switched over to strength training and selected push-ups for the first exercise. I was little prepared for the butt-kicking about to be delivered to me. There were two things about this that made it extra challenging.

First, I’m 6′2 with a moderately large frame and my normal push-up stance is about a foot wider than the balance board. That meant I had to place each hand about 6 inches farther in than I’m used to, which works the pecs and triceps in a different way.

Second, the Wii Fit push-up includes a rotation move where, when you finish the actual push-up, you place one foot on top of the other, lift the arm on that side off the board and twist your torso so you’re now pointing at the sky. Then you hold it for a couple seconds. Although you start out only doing this six times, by the time I was done my arms were shaking and sweat was pouring off my face.

Time for some leg lunges. This involves standing on the board, extending one leg behind you and then dipping your hips down and bending the leg still on the board. On screen, you try to keep a red dot inside a yellow rectangle as a way of tracking your balance and staying in the proper position. You are then scored on how well you are able to keep that red dot steady. I did pretty good on this one, but was still happy to move on to the less-strenuous balancing activities.

These are some of the funnest exercises in the whole thing, because Nintendo’s turned them into mini-games with your whole body acting as the controller. The starting selection includes heading soccer balls, a ski slalom, a ski jump, and rolling giant marbles into holes. The soccer one is pretty hard. The balls come a pretty good clip, and it’s challenging to get your Mii to react just right. You also have to dodge shoes and other objects that deliver a head-rocking smack if you don’t. Harlan derived much amusement from watching his dad repeatedly take cleats in the face. The ski jump exercise is fun, but brief. You have to squat as your Mii skis down the ramp, shifting your balance to keep a red dot hovering over a blue dot to gain maximum speed. Then you forcefully stand up at the end of the ramp to pull off the jump.

I wrapped up my workout with yoga, figuring this would be an easy, relaxing way to finish off. It was my last mistake of the night. I did the “warrior stance” and “half moon”. I read somewhere that pain often blocks your memory of some events, which must explain why I can’t recall exactly what the warrior stance was about. It consists of standing sideways, stretching your stance out and leaning in the direction of the board while extending your arms and keeping your weight evenly distributed on your two legs. The half moon looked deceptively easy, but it quickly had my arms screaming in agony. You stretch your arms over your head and clasp your hands. Then, stretching skyward, tilt to one side and hold, hold, hold; then do the other side.

I tell you, I have a new respect for yoga. Underneath that soul-calming, body-limbering, Enya-soundtracked philosophy is a vicious, muscle-burning, ass-kickingly tough set of exercises that would lead any masochist to swear off the cat ‘o nine tails and nipple clamps for life. Today I was feeling a strange pain in my thighs and finally figured out that it had to be from working groups of neglected muscles.

I also have a new respect for Wii Fit. It remains to be seen if it will have staying power or if it will soon be collecting dust next to all those exercycles, Bowflexes and ab machines. An article I wrote on Firday (incidentally the top result when you search Google News for “wii fit”) touches on some of these issues and also gives some background on the game’s designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s resident creative genius and the guy who came up with Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda and Nintendogs.

I plan on doing about 20 minutes a night with Wii Fit and see where I end up. The return of long days and warm weather means I’ll be doing more actual running and swimming as well, so it will be hard to tell what the exact contribution of Wii Fit is, but I’m hoping it will at least engender a continued awareness of fitness at home. I can see coming home from work exhausted after a long day and doing 20 minutes of quick exercises to bring the spirits back up.

Hopefully I’ll at least notice those yoga routines getting easier.

(Recommended additional reading forWii Fit: New York Times article here, Time hands-on here. Hit the jump below to read my article from Friday,or clink the link above)

By Scott Hillis

 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – For years, video games have been blamed for turning kids into idle layabouts who only venture off the couch to fill up on potato chips and soda.

 

Nintendo Co Ltd now aims to shatter that image with a game that aims to get players off the couch and lead them to stretch, shake and sweat their way to a healthy life.

 

“Wii Fit,” which arrives on U.S. store shelves on Monday, is expected to draw new customers to Nintendo’s wildly popular Wii video game console.

 

It is forecast to be the industry’s latest blockbuster game after last month’s “Grand Theft Auto 4,” the criminal action title that racked up $500 million in global sales in one week.

 

“They’ll sell everything they can manufacture,” said Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald. “It extends the life cycle of the Wii a little bit and gets people to go out and buy another game from Nintendo.”

 

The Wii has proven to be the runaway hit of the video game industry, thanks to its easy-to-learn motion-sensing controller, simple games and low price.

 

U.S. consumers bought 714,000 Wiis in April, nearly double the sales of Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360 and Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 combined.

 

At the other end of the spectrum from “Grand Theft Auto 4,” “Wii Fit” coaches players through more than 40 exercises that range from tightrope-walking to yoga stances to push-ups.

 

The $90 game comes with a shoulder-width “balance board” that senses tiny shifts in a person’s posture and is used to control a cartoonish character on the TV screen.

 

It is shaping up to be the latest in a string of hits for the Osaka, Japan-based company, which has tapped a rich vein of previously undiscovered mass-market interest in gaming with the Wii and titles like “Wii Play.”

 

“Wii Fit” has sold more than two million units in Japan since its launch late last year, and Nintendo says interest is “strong” in Europe, where it went on sale last month.

 

In its fourth fiscal quarter ended in March, Nintendo saw its profit jump 60 percent from a year earlier. The company is counting on “Wii Fit” to help drive growth this quarter.

 

Nintendo is banking that the United States, a country whose increasingly overweight population never met an exercise craze it didn’t like, will be prime territory for “Wii Fit.”

 

“The preorders were very strong across the market, really showing the breadth of demand for the product,” Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America, told Reuters.

 

“We’re finding people ranging from core gamers excited about this as new piece of innovation, to people who have never considered a video game,” Dunaway said.

 

The interactive nature and possibility of new games and features down the road may help “Wii Fit” avoid the fate of the innumerable health fads whose appeal fades after a few months.

 

“It is a perfect intersection of entertainment with health and fitness and I don’t think anyone’s been able to pull that off,” said Geoff Keighley, host of “GameTrailers TV.”

 

It is the latest idea to spring from the head of Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary game creator behind Nintendo’s most valuable franchises, including its “Mario” and “Zelda” titles.

 

Often dubbed the Walt Disney of video games, Miyamoto has a knack for crafting mega-hit games out of mundane activities such as gardening (Pikmin) and dog ownership (Nintendogs).

 

The seeds for “Wii Fit” were planted four years ago, before the Wii had even been developed, when Miyamoto went on a diet and started graphing his daily weight. He began thinking about a game that would let people track their own body mass.

 

“We couldn’t decide on what the next step would be and work came to a virtual standstill,” Miyamoto said in an interview on Nintendo’s Web site. “Until, that is, a staff member bought two scales, and found that it was pretty good fun to step on both of them at once and try to balance on them evenly.”

 

“I don’t think Wii Fit’s purpose is to make you fit. What it’s actually aiming to do is make you aware of your body.”