Wii Fit Review

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Despite this it's fun to compare Wii Fit ages, and it's a neat way of tracking your progress. As with Brain Training you get to stamp your calendar each day you complete a test. There are graphs to show how you're progressing and how close you are to reaching any weight loss targets set. There's satisfaction to be had.

With the Body Test out of the way it's time to move on to training. There are four categories of exercises to choose from - Yoga, Muscle Workouts, Aerobic Exercises and Balance games. They're designed to improve your posture, tone your muscles, burn fat and improve your balance respectively.

At first less than half the exercises in each category are available. The amount of time you spend on them is stored in a virtual piggy bank, and the more minutes you collect the more exercises you unlock. So even if you're rubbish at everything, you're rewarded just for putting in the effort (although if you do perform well you'll get extras such as higher difficulty levels and different stamps for your calendar).

Wii Fit Yoga, like proper yoga, is all about stretching your body and maintaining your balance - the difference being the balance board is there to measure performance. The Muscle Workouts are more traditional exercises, involving lots of lunging and bending and some impossibly hard press-up sequences. You're often left feeling out of breath and, if you're not used to this whole fitness thing and didn't warm-up properly, with aching limbs the next day.

Yoga flame.View the high quality video on EGTV

The yoga and muscle exercises are most like what you'd expect to do in a gym, and are consequently the most boring. Being able to track your balance does add novelty value, and there's the added advantage of not having to show a group of strangers what you look like in lycra. (Unless you work for the Internet, but that's another story.) But it's a shame there are 15 in each category to unlock compared to nine each in the Aerobic and Balance sections, which are much more fun.

This is partly because they feature Miis stored on your console rather than the android-like trainers. The aerobic step exercise, for example, shows you and a bundle of familiar Miis standing on a stage as you work out, facing an audience of other friendly faces - so you might see your Mum cheering you on. When you're jogging through a pretty Nintendo park (an exercise which doesn't use the balance board at all, but instructs you to place the Wii remote in your back pocket to act as a pedometer) your friends will wave at you from the sidelines. In one memorable incident, my ex-boyfriend raced past me only to trip and fall flat on his face.

In addition, Wii Fit gives regular players priority placing as background characters. So if you're trying out the hula hoop catching exercise (wiggling your pelvis in circles, shifting your weight left and right at the right moment), the last two people who played the game will be the ones chucking the hoops. It's just one of many neat little touches that remind you this is a Nintendo product through and through.

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