Reviews// Wii Fit

Onto the actual exercise... Heading footballs is simply an act of leaning from side to side while dodging the occasional flying boot (don’t blame Sir Alex [We won't even mention that man... Ed]), with no actual heading movement required, so it quickly becomes repetitive.

Downhill skiing (a separate challenge from the ski jump) does a decent job of simulating the arcade laughs of Namco’s Alpine Racer, but only in microcosm.

Tightrope walking is a tense balancing act where you are actually permitted to walk on the Balance Board - so as to help your Mii tiptoe from one building to another. The vertigo levels are increased by having to jump (in a ski-jumping, fake sort of motion) over roving metal Mii-munching machines as they zip from one end of the rope to the other.

The most interesting balance game is a board-controlled reinterpretation of Hudson’s excellent (but brief) Kororinpa where you have to guide Mii-emblazoned marbles on wooden boards to their hole goals. The wife finds this game most frustrating, but perhaps that’s because it’s edging into actual game territory. Time to switch to non-game type then.

3:00pm: Returning to Wii Fit after lunch, there’s no chance of being weighed again (which is just as well) because the software permits BMI testing and weighing only once a day - just as Wii Sports rations your age testing. So, we try jogging first of all, which is classed as an aerobic exercise.

To jog in Wii Fit you don’t use the Balance Board, instead you just have to put a Wii Remote in your pocket and then begin jogging in front of the TV like some crackpot who jogs in his living room.

It’s best to shut the blinds before any Wii Fit activity, I think, just to preserve a vestige of dignity and self-respect - but particularly when jogging.

The setting for jogging is lovely, mind - a peaceful park/island full of the other jogging Miis who live inside your Wii. There’s a guide jogger who you have to keep up with, and the course loops around until a goal is reached five minutes later. I find five minutes of jogging to be just a bit too long and I end up out of breath as I cross the finish line.

The missus is mocking my apparent lack of stamina (um, just to reiterate, we’re only talking about jogging here) and reckons she could complete the course without gasping once. She proceeds to do so, pulling dance moves and steps towards the end as a show of female superiority. With Wii Fit, the humiliation for male gamers might never end.