OMG Nintendo.com

Peter Moore was furiously talking up EA Sports Active earlier this week, especially in his GameSpot interview, as an exer-game more tailored to Western weight loss tastes. What I found interesting is that the introduction to the interview implies, more or less, that Wii Fit doesn't really work anyway.

However, once people took Wii Fit out of its box, many were quickly disappointed. The game focused on the Asian model of fitness--stretching and balance--instead of the weight loss favored in the West. Only a few minigames offered aerobic exercise, and some of those had to be unlocked by playing other games for hours. The game's shame-based motivation and use of the widely criticized BMI metric made many a Mii droop their head by calling even stick-thin children obese.

Now, I can't speak as to how good or bad EA Sports Active is ultimately going to be. I have spent lots of time with Wii Fit, though, and it works as well as anything else you'll buy in that price range. It's not a perfect or complete solution to weight loss, though... but very few people understand that there's really no such thing, at least not at an affordable price.

I've lost fifteen pounds since I started using Wii Fit for about 45 minutes daily back in June. The loss is at a very gentle rate, and I did modify my diet quite a bit after I started working out. More vegetables, more fiber, less fat, less starch, smaller portions. I vary my routine from day to day based on how I feel, I skip some days if I'm too busy, and other days I skip Wii Fit to go exercise outside. Even during protracted periods where I go without Wii Fit, I'm still losing weight at a fairly consistent, gradual pace.

There are things I could be doing to lose weight much faster than Wii Fit's indoor exercises and a modified diet can really make possible. I could join Weight Watchers, which I've seen take 60 pounds off of my father since he started in April, and has worked for pretty much everyone I know who's gone on the program and has dutifully counted their points. I could go pay for a membership to one of the local gyms, which would give me the benefit of more sophisticated workout equipment and a trainer. Both of these options cost a lot more than Wii Fit or EA Sports Active do, though.

Also, I don't really want to lose weight too quickly, as I've seen that this can cause you something of a wardrobe problem. My father actually had to go on a few emergency shopping sprees around his fourth and fifth months of Weight Watchers. By losing gradually, I can cycle in new clothes that fit my smaller frame better as bigger clothes I can't wear anymore head into plastic storage totes. What's nice about Wii Fit is that it makes it very easy to check the pace of your weight loss and, from that, predict how it's going to change in the future provided you keep eating right and exercising. I shouldn't need to do serious clothes-buying at my current rate of loss until this spring, when I'd be investing a lot in clothes anyway.

Initially I didn't really plan to buy or use Wii Fit, since some of GameSpot's complaints about the product are... well, eminently reasonable. The generic BMI index Wii Fit uses to classify your as Obese or Overweight is pretty worthless, and should be ignored. It's especially invalid for children, whose growing bodies don't conform to the way BMI calculates ideal weights. The only truly good way to determine your ideal weight is to go get a physical from a doctor who has plenty of information about your health history and lifestyle.

GameSpot's complaint about having to unlock exercises is dead-on, too. I think I had used Wii Fit for about two months before I had enough credits to get all 48 exercises, games, and activity options unlocked. It was very tedious getting to better options (like the Jackknife Challenge, an excellent workout) by enduring far inferior ones (like the regular Jackknife routine, which only lets you do up to 30 per day). The way credits are handed out also makes little sense, with strenuous exercises like the Plank only offering about as many as you'd get from playing one of the balance games.

I'll actually pony up another minor complaint about Wii Fit, too: some of the exercises are just plain stupid. Lotus Focus is nearly impossible to fail. All of the running games are ridiculous, and I can only imagine how frustrating they'd be to apartment-dwellers. Some of the yoga poses you can unlock are not only ludicrously difficult, but don't even use the Balance Board-- you could select them, do nothing at all, and still get credits. Finally, there's the Tricep Extension, which involves doing reps of the Wii Remote.

That said, these complaints are still... well, really minor. Most pieces of exercise equipment you could get for $90 or less, short of maybe arm or ankle weights, aren't going to offer you nearly the return that Wii Fit will. (Even weights are only as useful as the exercise routines you use them with.) While Wii Fit does offer a lot of duds and time-wasters, it also offers a lot of routines that will build up legitimate muscle mass if you do them daily, and some of the yoga poses offer excellent opportunities to stretch and gauge your muscle strength. Just doing push-ups and planks has built my upper body up tremendously.

I've gone through a lot of "play video games to lose weight!" junk, too, since I know professional writers tend to let their bodies fall apart and then die young of heart problems at a young age. It's practically an epidemic among full-time bloggers. Dance Dance Revolution didn't cut it, nor any of its knock-outs, and Wii Sports sure as heck isn't a valid workout. I can't stand aerobics shows, with their chatty perky dippy trainers, and the local gym kind of sucks on top of being terribly expensive. I do like just about all types of video games, though.

So, Wii Fit works for me. It won't work for everybody, and it would especially not work for a male buyer interested primarily in building up muscle to burn that. That said, neither would EA Sports Active, and Peter Moore knows that perfectly well, too. Just like Wii Fit, the audience it's targeting - and the audience it will most likely to work for - is women my age who fear encroaching couch potatodom. It doesn't really take a lot of sophisticated routines or equipment to pull this off, it's really more a matter of willpower and time invested. Wii Fit is just a tool that helps you get from A to B. All EA Sports Active can really aspire to is being an equally useful tool.

• << prev
• next >>