I must say, contrary to an old post about the Wii Fit in FG before, I personally find  the Wii Fit a fun (and geeky) way to exercise!

Like most Wii Games, you start out by making your own Mii (if you don’t have one yet). And then you step on the Wii Balance Board for the Wii to be able to extract some personal data like your weight and BMI. If you are sensitive about your vital statistics, you can put a password on your Wii Fit account so that other people won’t be able to see your weight. It even has a pet stats for your pets! Unfortunately, you can only weigh your pets and your pets definitely can’t participate in the exercises and game, hehe.

After that you get to choose a training from four different categories: yoga, strength training, aerobics and balance games.

The aerobics and balance games are very fun and you can choose from a variety of games like Hula Hoop, Rhythm Boxing, Stepping, Running, Soccer Heading, Ski Jumping, Skate Boarding and Snow Boarding.

Here’s a less embarrassing video of my fiance playing the Soccer game.

I would have preferred posting the extremely hilarious video of him playing Air Humping Super Hula Hoop but I don’t want to scare people away, hehe.

The yoga and strength training exercises were just too boring to do though but it had potential, if you had the time and discipline to make your own work out regimen.

After each activity or exercise, the Wii Fit will give you a score of how much calories you burned. The numbers are probably not accurate, but it is a nice basis on how much effort you’re actually putting in for exercise.

However, if you are serious work out fanatic, don’t expect too much from the Wii Fit. Nothing beats a regular work out at the gym. But I personally think that it’s a great way to keep your blood circulating and your heart pumping after spending a day in front of your TV or computer playing video games.

[ Images and video by GeekGirlManila ]

I got a Wii Fit for Christmas and was super excited. Not only do I love the idea of having an easy, indoor exercise solution during the cold days of winter, but as a geek there was just something beautiful about the idea of my video game system doubling as my exercise gym.

My expectations were high, but did Wii Fit live up to them? The short answer is no. Here’s why.

There are three major shortcomings with Wii Fit in my opinion.

1) Wii Fit Is Missing Defined Exercise Programs
Perhaps the most glaring problem with Wii Fit is that it has no prescribed exercise program. You are left to your own devices in putting together a daily regiment. But I found this to be a major defect, because most of us would like to optimize the time we put into working out, and instead we are left guessing as to what is most effective. What Wii Fit should have provided, but didn’t, was the ability to take a quiz to determine what’s most important to you (weight loss, strength training, etc.) Each day, it would ask “How much time do you have to work out today?” Based on this information it could suggest 3-5 workout programs custom fit to your needs. But alas, nothing like this was present.

2) Too Much Downtime Between Exercises
As others have noted, it takes too much time to move onto the next exercise once you are finished with the previous one. Sure, if you’ve just taken a 10 minute jog, the minute or so it takes to move from the end of one exercise to the beginning of another is fine. But if you’re doing simple 1-2 minute, low-impact exercises, you quickly find that you spend half your time navigating the menus rather than keeping that heart rate up. Most of us have trouble fitting exercise into our daily routines. When it takes 30 minutes to do 15 minutes worth of exercising on the Wii Fit, it takes a psychology toll, and it feels like time is wasted.

3) Wii Fit Fails To Motivate
One of the most promising things of an exercise system built into a video game is the ability to motivate. Motivation is usually the number one inhibitor to daily exercise. Wii Fit could have easily implemented a deeply addictive RPG leveling up component to the game. But all we have to motivate us to use Wii Fit is the prospect of unlocking new exercises, losing weight and putting in more exercise hours….hardly things unique to Wii Fit. If anything, the Wii Fit is de-motivational because you know that if you take a few days off, you’ll get lectured. To drive home the idea that Wii Fit fails to motivate: I only lasted two weeks before I thoroughly lost interest.

At the end of the day, as a Geek, I needed more structure, more efficiency and more gaming elements built into the system. As it stands, not only was I bored with Wii Fit, but I also constantly felt like I was wasting time.

Ryan is a co-founder of the online information project Brainz.

I still haven’t found a single retailer of the Wii Fit. My search has been so futile, it’s like searching for the holy grail.

I knew that this shortage of Wii Fit and the Wii Balance Board is going to be taken advantage of by third party developers… and I was right. Njoy has recently released their own version of the Balance Board.

Njoy’s G-Board Balance Board looks similar to Nintendo’s except for some marked differences. The foot markers are more defined, there is an LCD Display that presumably shows your weight as well as other pertinent data for each game, and most significantly, it is priced higher than the original board.

Wii’s board only costs less than a $100, but Njoy’s clone is priced at $130, almost the price of the Wii Balance Board in online auction sites. Is this a good strategy? Only time will tell.

As for me, I’m willing to wait a little more for a cheaper original board.

In last February’s Game Developers Conference, Nintendo announced that its Wii Fit game / peripheral will be available in the market by May 19. This has greatly excited gamers and fitness freaks alike and have basically marked the date as D-Day for the Wii Fit.

But Nintendo’s advertising campaign for the product has muddled the actual launch date when it was announced that the game will be made available on May 21. Nintendo of America representatives confirmed that May 19 is the correct date but it was discovered that it was only half true as the company announced that the May 19 launch is only applicable in the Nintendo World Store in New York. It was reported that the Wii Fit sold out in just under an hour.  There are now reports that there is a shortage of Wii Fit units, which explains how  the game quickly sold out.