I've been using the original Wii Fit since shortly after it released. To give you a little background, before that time, I had only the beginnings of an exercise routine; I had scavenged an old exercise bike (now broken and still needing to be donated for scrap metal) and would ride it while getting into a game or two. Wii Fit was purchased in part because I wanted to see what it could do for me, in part because I did some yoga at its first E3 and thought it was pretty fun, and in part because the bathroom scale I had been using was a piece of trash.
Fast-forward to today and, in our Wii Fit save, you'll find seventeen months of weight data charting my progress downward, back up again a bit, and back down—currently pushing to get it even lower. You'll see in the Fit Credits chart lengthy bursts of activity as my usual morning yoga gets added to markedly lengthier gray bars where I'd enter my nightly rides on the recumbent exercise bike I picked up after the old bike busted, separated by uncomfortably empty spaces of nothing at all or a little blue indicating a brief amount of yoga here and there.
Through it all, I found that Wii Fit fit what I wanted to do with fitness. A selection of its exercises helped my stiff desk-job body loosen up and gain strength. Its charting helped me take a look at the bigger picture of my long-term weight loss goals. I was happy with Fit, but that didn't stop me from eyeing the improvements Nintendo promised to ship with Wii Fit Plus.
I picked up my copy at the local Best Buy on release day, joking to my wife that the dozen-or-so shoppers lined up for the store opening were my competition for the prize—Wii Fit has certainly been a sales wonder for Nintendo. Shockingly, everyone darted off in different directions once they let us in, leaving me alone to approach the table where the new bundles were displayed alongside a stack of $20 disc-only upgrades, from which I plucked my prize, taking a moment to groan at the notion of seeing the crazy smiling lady on the cover every morning (seriously, Plus is a huge step back in the cover art department.) Slightly bemused, I checked out and popped it in as soon as we got home.
Importing my lengthy Wii Fit history was less than painless; it was simply done, with a brief commentary from the anthropomorphic on-screen Balance Board, leaving me free to start checking out what was new. Wii Fit Plus is intended to completely replace your old Wii Fit disc (which I am considering pawning off in case someone has broken their original); it literally has every last thing the first game has and then some—the biggest thing that's missing is several inches of midriff cover from the mannequinish female trainer's getup. If you didn't see a thing wrong with the way Wii Fit did things, you'll be able to continue on almost exactly as before with Plus.
The real notable exception to the above that bears noting is that they've changed up the Body Test routine a little bit. Previously, you were able to abort said test midway. I did this every day, as (a) I find the "Wii Fit Age" utterly worthless, and (b) I'm not permitted to do some of the randomly-selected tests anyway, by order of my podiatrist. (Weak ankle means no balancing on one leg.) Now, going through the Body Test proper means you must not only do these, but some new ones that apparently involve your mind as well. But there's a new option available that suits me just fine: the Simple Test.
Immediately after clicking your Mii, before the Balance Board even begins to blather on about the weather or bananas or whatever, you can click this new icon and jump right into getting your weight and center-of-balance measured. In less than a minute, it's charted and you can shut it off and go. The only limitation is that you'll not be able to change the weight of your clothing in this mode; but honestly, since I strive to get as accurate a weight as I can, I never go through a Body Test without a similar exercise outfit anyway, so no loss on my end.
The theme of getting your shit done quickly takes us into my other favorite mode. Behind an odd-looking door on your calendar screen lies several cool new options for doing the same old exercises, plus a few (more on that later). There are a number of preset routines in here for taking on various goals you may wish to achieve, such as toning up your hips—the little picture of the Mii staring over her shoulder at her buttocks is priceless. I flipped through these a bit and found them thoroughly uninteresting, honestly. At best, they're inspiration for the other routine mode behind this door: My Routine.
My Routine gives you a little virtual clipboard and lets you queue up pretty much any number of yoga and strength exercises you want. It remembers yesterday's routine in case you want to repeat it verbatim, but it's so efficient to build up that I usually just clear it in part or whole every morning and adjust the routine to my taste. There are no rep adjustments available per-exercise, but you can just jam in additional sets if you want to do it a lot. The reason this works is because once you start, chances are you won't have to touch the Remote again as you sail through the whole routine. Even the warning screens I've seen, though they tantalizingly flash the A-button indicator begging for acknowledgement, vanish of their own accord after about four seconds, a welcome surprise I found as I was unrolling a mat between exercises one morning.
You don't get scored on My Routine, you don't have to hear the trainer summarize how you did on each exercise (though you'll still get a couple sentences at the end of the routine), you just get to the end and get your time and your calories-burned estimate and you're done. (Yeah, the calories-burned is new, too. It's pervasive throughout Plus, and it's at least somewhat sound in its calculations. I consider it a point of interest, though I don't necessarily hang my diet calculations on it.) But yes, done and, by my reckoning, saving 5-10 minutes every morning. It's crazy how much time I used to waste on that old repetitive chatter and menu navigation.
Beyond pure exercises—Plus adds three each of new yoga and strength activities—there are fifteen new Balance Board minigames on offer as well. A tiny few are enhanced versions of classics from the original Fit (which, of course, are still playable in Plus); the new Table Tilt is particularly devious with crazy gadgets to deal with. There are also several new activities which, considering I was already prepared to pay $20 just to make my morning exercises more efficient, make Plus feel like a steal.
Topping the list for coolest activity is the Obstacle Course, pimped prominently this year by Nintendo for giving you the chance to feel what it's like to be Mario. While I haven't yet figured out how to throw fireballs, my family and I have all had a ton of fun jogging in place, stopping, and doing the "Balance Board jump" (squatting down, then standing up quickly, without actually leaving the ground) to avoid swinging pendulums and rolling logs and get to the finish line as quickly as possible. The lesser activities are almost all universally fun as well, at least in smaller doses. There's no structure to these, and you can't queue them up in a routine, but that's not really how they're designed to be played anyway, so no loss here.
I mentioned in early impressions that Plus is also much more suited to multiplayer play. In the original, you were of course scored alongside your fellow family members or housemates for any activity, but actually competing was the antithesis of smooth, requiring you to back all the way out to the startup Plaza screen just to let someone else have a go—and that would only work if they were registered and had the activities unlocked in the first place.
Not so with Plus; there's an easily-accessible Switch button in the Training mode that lets you jump to any other Mii at any time, with the only caveat that Miis not registered in your copy of Wii Fit won't have their scores saved. If you really do want to play Plus in a party atmosphere, there's an actual multiplayer mode available now as well. You won't go head-to-head at the same time, but inside, a selection of the game's activities are tweaked slightly for a party's faster pace, collecting scores and throwing up the Mii selection screen to let the next one in line (or even the same again, for do-overs) take their turn as soon as the current player fails.
Wii Fit Plus is exactly what it says on the box: Wii Fit, plus a set of enhancements that perhaps should have even been in the first version—but nonetheless are hard to argue with when the upgrade is only $20. People who are getting it for the first time in the $100 bundle right now (and there must be some—I went to Best Buy again later that week and they were only selling old dusty bundles of the original, no Plus bundles in sight) are going to get the great improvements right off the bat. For those of us who got into Fit originally, though, finding it workable and enjoyable though in need of a few tweaks—Plus delivers.
Fast-forward to today and, in our Wii Fit save, you'll find seventeen months of weight data charting my progress downward, back up again a bit, and back down—currently pushing to get it even lower. You'll see in the Fit Credits chart lengthy bursts of activity as my usual morning yoga gets added to markedly lengthier gray bars where I'd enter my nightly rides on the recumbent exercise bike I picked up after the old bike busted, separated by uncomfortably empty spaces of nothing at all or a little blue indicating a brief amount of yoga here and there.
Through it all, I found that Wii Fit fit what I wanted to do with fitness. A selection of its exercises helped my stiff desk-job body loosen up and gain strength. Its charting helped me take a look at the bigger picture of my long-term weight loss goals. I was happy with Fit, but that didn't stop me from eyeing the improvements Nintendo promised to ship with Wii Fit Plus.
I picked up my copy at the local Best Buy on release day, joking to my wife that the dozen-or-so shoppers lined up for the store opening were my competition for the prize—Wii Fit has certainly been a sales wonder for Nintendo. Shockingly, everyone darted off in different directions once they let us in, leaving me alone to approach the table where the new bundles were displayed alongside a stack of $20 disc-only upgrades, from which I plucked my prize, taking a moment to groan at the notion of seeing the crazy smiling lady on the cover every morning (seriously, Plus is a huge step back in the cover art department.) Slightly bemused, I checked out and popped it in as soon as we got home.
Importing my lengthy Wii Fit history was less than painless; it was simply done, with a brief commentary from the anthropomorphic on-screen Balance Board, leaving me free to start checking out what was new. Wii Fit Plus is intended to completely replace your old Wii Fit disc (which I am considering pawning off in case someone has broken their original); it literally has every last thing the first game has and then some—the biggest thing that's missing is several inches of midriff cover from the mannequinish female trainer's getup. If you didn't see a thing wrong with the way Wii Fit did things, you'll be able to continue on almost exactly as before with Plus.
The real notable exception to the above that bears noting is that they've changed up the Body Test routine a little bit. Previously, you were able to abort said test midway. I did this every day, as (a) I find the "Wii Fit Age" utterly worthless, and (b) I'm not permitted to do some of the randomly-selected tests anyway, by order of my podiatrist. (Weak ankle means no balancing on one leg.) Now, going through the Body Test proper means you must not only do these, but some new ones that apparently involve your mind as well. But there's a new option available that suits me just fine: the Simple Test.
Immediately after clicking your Mii, before the Balance Board even begins to blather on about the weather or bananas or whatever, you can click this new icon and jump right into getting your weight and center-of-balance measured. In less than a minute, it's charted and you can shut it off and go. The only limitation is that you'll not be able to change the weight of your clothing in this mode; but honestly, since I strive to get as accurate a weight as I can, I never go through a Body Test without a similar exercise outfit anyway, so no loss on my end.
The theme of getting your shit done quickly takes us into my other favorite mode. Behind an odd-looking door on your calendar screen lies several cool new options for doing the same old exercises, plus a few (more on that later). There are a number of preset routines in here for taking on various goals you may wish to achieve, such as toning up your hips—the little picture of the Mii staring over her shoulder at her buttocks is priceless. I flipped through these a bit and found them thoroughly uninteresting, honestly. At best, they're inspiration for the other routine mode behind this door: My Routine.
My Routine gives you a little virtual clipboard and lets you queue up pretty much any number of yoga and strength exercises you want. It remembers yesterday's routine in case you want to repeat it verbatim, but it's so efficient to build up that I usually just clear it in part or whole every morning and adjust the routine to my taste. There are no rep adjustments available per-exercise, but you can just jam in additional sets if you want to do it a lot. The reason this works is because once you start, chances are you won't have to touch the Remote again as you sail through the whole routine. Even the warning screens I've seen, though they tantalizingly flash the A-button indicator begging for acknowledgement, vanish of their own accord after about four seconds, a welcome surprise I found as I was unrolling a mat between exercises one morning.
You don't get scored on My Routine, you don't have to hear the trainer summarize how you did on each exercise (though you'll still get a couple sentences at the end of the routine), you just get to the end and get your time and your calories-burned estimate and you're done. (Yeah, the calories-burned is new, too. It's pervasive throughout Plus, and it's at least somewhat sound in its calculations. I consider it a point of interest, though I don't necessarily hang my diet calculations on it.) But yes, done and, by my reckoning, saving 5-10 minutes every morning. It's crazy how much time I used to waste on that old repetitive chatter and menu navigation.
Beyond pure exercises—Plus adds three each of new yoga and strength activities—there are fifteen new Balance Board minigames on offer as well. A tiny few are enhanced versions of classics from the original Fit (which, of course, are still playable in Plus); the new Table Tilt is particularly devious with crazy gadgets to deal with. There are also several new activities which, considering I was already prepared to pay $20 just to make my morning exercises more efficient, make Plus feel like a steal.
Topping the list for coolest activity is the Obstacle Course, pimped prominently this year by Nintendo for giving you the chance to feel what it's like to be Mario. While I haven't yet figured out how to throw fireballs, my family and I have all had a ton of fun jogging in place, stopping, and doing the "Balance Board jump" (squatting down, then standing up quickly, without actually leaving the ground) to avoid swinging pendulums and rolling logs and get to the finish line as quickly as possible. The lesser activities are almost all universally fun as well, at least in smaller doses. There's no structure to these, and you can't queue them up in a routine, but that's not really how they're designed to be played anyway, so no loss here.
I mentioned in early impressions that Plus is also much more suited to multiplayer play. In the original, you were of course scored alongside your fellow family members or housemates for any activity, but actually competing was the antithesis of smooth, requiring you to back all the way out to the startup Plaza screen just to let someone else have a go—and that would only work if they were registered and had the activities unlocked in the first place.
Not so with Plus; there's an easily-accessible Switch button in the Training mode that lets you jump to any other Mii at any time, with the only caveat that Miis not registered in your copy of Wii Fit won't have their scores saved. If you really do want to play Plus in a party atmosphere, there's an actual multiplayer mode available now as well. You won't go head-to-head at the same time, but inside, a selection of the game's activities are tweaked slightly for a party's faster pace, collecting scores and throwing up the Mii selection screen to let the next one in line (or even the same again, for do-overs) take their turn as soon as the current player fails.
Wii Fit Plus is exactly what it says on the box: Wii Fit, plus a set of enhancements that perhaps should have even been in the first version—but nonetheless are hard to argue with when the upgrade is only $20. People who are getting it for the first time in the $100 bundle right now (and there must be some—I went to Best Buy again later that week and they were only selling old dusty bundles of the original, no Plus bundles in sight) are going to get the great improvements right off the bat. For those of us who got into Fit originally, though, finding it workable and enjoyable though in need of a few tweaks—Plus delivers.