For the yoga and strength exercises you’ll be shown a demonstration of each exercise prior to your first time undertaking the exercise so that you don’t go into things cold. This is a nice touch, however it is lacking in that it doesn’t show you what widget will be used to determine if you’re actually doing the exercise correctly, be it a yellow circle to keep your balance in, a blue bar to keep the pressure of your legs in, or a straight line to show how high to hold the Wiimote. As a result, you attempt the exercise, feeling like you know what you should be doing, only to find yourself watching the TV most of the time to make sure you’re getting colored doohickey A correctly placed in colored area B.

After each exercise you’ll be graded on how well you kept your balance, or if you completed every repetition and given a score for your time. Sometimes your trainer will tell you that you’re not strong enough to do an exercise, as if your own knowledge of your lack of fitness wasn’t enough to shame you. Thanks Wii Fit trainer! Once you’re done with the exercise you can choose to retry it or move back to the menu, which brings us to one of the main problems with Wii Fit, namely that there’s no way to do the different exercises without exiting out to the menu and picking a new one.

After completing some exercises you’ll be given suggestions for complimentary exercises, which is great, however to then have to exit out of a couple of screens just to go find the new exercise is a pain. What ends up happening is that for every minute of time spent working out, represented as Fit Credits which go towards unlocking additional games and exercises, you spend a minute navigating the menus. The ability to queue up a list of exercises and go from one right to the other would be a huge benefit to this game, as well as go a long way towards maintaining a steady level of effort when exercising.

Navigational nitpicks aside, the yoga and strength training exercises are all well done and provide a great workout. The yoga poses seem fairly easy until you have to hold one for 30 seconds and your ankles start begging for mercy. The strength training won’t get you on the cover of “Men’s Bodybuilding” any time soon, but are just the thing for toning up the various parts of your body. As you progress through the strength training you’ll unlock more repetitions so that you can torture yourself for longer periods of time.

The aerobic exercises are fun, however they don’t get your heart going as quickly as you’d need it to in order to recognize any real benefit. Activities range from putting the Wiimote in your pocket and running in place (placing it on your thigh and riding an exercise bike works too, and is much easier on the knees) to being in a step aerobics performance, to an incredibly fun boxing training game that utilizes the Wiimote and Nunchuk to throw punches.

Once you’ve worked out enough and are ready for some fun, there is a nice collection of balance board games to keep things light. You’ll be heading soccer balls, navigating your bubble encased Mii down a river, walking a tightrope or sitting on the balance board, as still as possible, to keep a burning candle lit. The ski jump mini game is quite possibly the most addictive mini game to ever grace a Nintendo title and as such should be regulated as a controlled substance. All of the balance board games show off the balance board to great degrees and will hopefully provide fertile ground to game designers looking for ways to use the new peripheral.

So, will Wii Fit provide you with everything you need to become a better, slender you? As with every exercise program, you’ll get results only if you put the time in. Wii Fit certainly has plenty of motivating factors there, what with the trainers, the ability to unlock new exercises and the balance board games to mix things up, but at the end of the day, you still need to want to get fit to stay interested in the game. People who are serious about weight loss will need to supplement the activities in the game with a more substantial cardio workout to keep those calories flying off, as there just isn’t enough here to really get your heart rate up.

In the end, Wii Fit works at what it was created to do, namely raise your level of fitness awareness and get you off of the couch and exercising. The menu navigation takes up too much work out time, and the means of evaluating your fitness level is dubious, however the game provides plenty of good exercises and balance board games to keep those excited about fitness coming back. As with Wii Sports showing off the motion capabilities of the Wii, Nintendo has shown the world what can be done with the balance board and provided a decent exercise game to boot. With a few tweaks to the formula provided in Wii Fit, a great exercise game is there for the making. Just please, no more lunges.

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