Wii Fit Feet On Preview

Wii Fit Preview

By Matt Kelly

We were in Sydney this Friday checking out a few different games on their way out, so we swung by the Australian Fitness Expo to have a play highly anticipated WiiFit. From the first look it sung true to Nintendo's 'Wii' game series design ethos, and continued to do so right through our playtest.

Wiifit comes as a bundle of the software and the Wii Balance Board, and during our time with it we got through a few of the games. The first one up was slope jumping on skis, where you'll go down a hill automatically, knees bent and have to spring up into a standing position (it has a very clear notice to not actually jump) which will launch you into the air. Timing and balance will determine how far you fly. It was a really simple introduction to how the Balance Board is really quite good at working out what your body is doing. We got the hang of it, increased the jump distance, and there was much joy. After that the attendant decided to ramp up the difficulty a notch by chucking us back on the slopes, this time in a down hill solom race through flags. Sure, jumping was a good introduction, but the down hill skiing really showed of that despite it's simple appearance, the Balance Board is ridiculously precise at detecting what you're doing. Put pressure on your left foot to go left, put it on your right to go right. Simple as DDR yeah? Not even slightly. On our first run through we hit maybe 3 on the 10 flags on the course, spending a lot more time flying back and forth across of the track. The attendant gave us a few pointers and we ran through it again. This time around though, we were focusing a lot more on our feet, and surprise surprise we hit our goals a lot more accurately. By the third we were actually doing pretty well (and incidentally beat one of the Nintendo rep's score, booya!). What this really showed though is the Balance Board is very reactive to weight distribution. Slightly shifting weight would send you gently to one side, putting all your weight on one foot would send you into wall. And just the mix it up a bit more the, putting the weight on the back or front of your feet would control your speed. Combining all of this together, we found ourselves more and more aware of what our feet were doing.

The final game we got to play was the hulahoop one that has been in all the trailers. The goal? Get as many spins as possible while also catching other rings that were thrown at you. Again, deceptively simple, but not without logic. While gyrating with a virtual hulahoop at a fitness expo is a bizarre enough experience in itself, the experience of the Wii Balance board reading your every move is equally as bizarre. As we started swing around, watching as our little breaks in the smooth movement bringing our hoops dangerously close to the ground, it became very apparent Wii Fit was an entirely different breed when put against something like Wii Sports. It's not longer about doing general gestures but rather finally controlled movement. But what was more exciting was it wasn't one of those precision things that grew boring, but rather became more and more enjoyable as we came to better understanding of our bodies. For a bizarre metaphor, it's like when you learn a new move in Street Fighter and suddenly kicking so much more ass. You understand how you're moving your body and you're suddenly hulahooping like crazy. Every once and a while we'd have to stop to bend around and catch an incoming hulahoop, which is harder than it sounds. Snapping out of smooth movement to do something quite jerky, and picking up the smooth movement again was something that took a few goes to get right. Again though, it's got logic to how it works, making enjoyable trying to conquer rather than a repetitive experience.

From what we saw, Wii Fit and the Balance Board are pretty impressive. The board shipping in Australia will be coming with a 150KG weight limit (as opposed to the Japanese 139KG). and will stores on May 8th. We'll have the full review for you then, and if you want to check it out yourself it's available to play at the Sydney Fitness Expo till close on Monday.

Tags: fit preview Wii

MrWii 19/04/2008

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