Wii Fit
Nintendo certainly knows how to play on people’s insecurities. With popular DS title, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, the Japanese company was banking on the fact that people don’t like to look stupid. Convince consumers that performing some rudimentary maths sums and memory tests will make them smarter and all you need to is count the money. With sales of Brain Training and its sequel dominating sales charts the world over it’s a formula that has proved sound. By that logic, then, Wii Fit will be the biggest title of 2008. Nobody wants to be unfit and overweight and, by turning the assumption that videogames are bad for our health on its head, meteoric success seems inevitable. Indeed, as the game hit Japanese shelves earlier in December it has been a runaway success.
Wii Fit is the natural extension of Wii Sports: a way for everyone in the family to do some daily exercise, monitored and recorded by the Wii. As a suite of fitness exercises the game uses a piece of additional hardware: the aerobics-style ‘balance board’. Like a set of bathroom scales (if bathroom scales were designed by Apple) the balance board uses pressure sensors to detect your weight distribution and the game’s various challenges are based around this data. The game even spits out reams of graphs and data to show how you’re becoming fitter, happier and more productive with every passing session.
The board is exceptionally well designed picking up the tiniest shift in weight distribution in an extremely satisfying and responsive manner. Games are spread over a number of different categories including body tests, muscle stretches, aerobic exercise, yoga poses and balance games. They range from minigames where you have to shift the weight from one leg to other with precise accuracy to tasks that involve moving your centre of gravity around a square to knock out the targets. In contrast, balance-style games see you heading a soccer ball with lunges to the left and the right or rolling balls around a tray in the Super Monkey ball style
With Yoga poses (which really strain after a few moments of holding the pose) and Pilates style pelvic floor exercising, the game is diverse and clever in its use of the peripheral. With readouts of your performance in each task each day it’s possible to monitor your progress with the game and see, in real terms, how much more supple, controlled and, presumably, fit you’re becoming on a day to day basis. Consumers’ sense of guilt and vanity is a powerful motivator and, for this reason combined with Nintendo’s ever-sublime execution, Wii Fit is destined to become 2008’s next big thing.
