E3 09 Hands-On Preview: Stick to the new vigorous bird-flapping game and this may be the only Plus-sized product you ever buy again.
When Nintendo introduced Wii Fit in May of 2008, its $90 price tag caused me to put it on the second tier of my wish list. I had just bought Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the weeks prior to its release and who knew if a balance board and exercise software at almost double the price of a normal Wii game would take off? Obviously, Nintendo knew. The bundle sold nearly 20 million units, and that’s despite the expensive price tag that you’d think consumers would rebel against.
Of course, like real exercising, I put it off buying Wii Fit. Luckily, Nintendo has been adding “New” and “Plus” to a lot of its products, and just like New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Wii MotionPlus, the company is launching Wii Fit Plus very soon. Like me, I bet a lot of consumers who didn’t pick up the original for the same reason are giving a second look to the second coming of healthy gaming.
At E3 2007, I played some Marble Madness-like mini-game in which I controlled a tilting landscape and tried to navigate a marble into a specific hole. It gave me a good impression of how the balance board could be an interactive experience for the feet. However, at E3 2009, the mini-games trumped the ones I saw two years ago and I really felt the burn in the process.
The first Wii Fit Plus mini-game had my Mii run through an obstacle course filled with balls swinging back and forth from chains and platforms moving left and right so that it was easy to fall down the bottomless gaps. For whatever reason, it seems this virtual obstacle course was built way up in the sky, so the key to making it to the end involved walking slowly up to each obstacle and then running on the balance board very quickly at the right moment.
I successfully finished the first two segments of the obstacle course, but lifted my feet off the balance board too much at one point and the entire level reset to the beginning. Apparently jumping between platforms translates to lifting just your heels off of the balance board and not both your feet like you’d expect. It’s an annoying technicality, but my time with this mini-game demo felt as very close to real exercise.
Amazingly, the next mini-game I tried got my arms into the calorie burning exercise program by dressing my Mii up as a bird and having me land on targets Pilotwings-style. I don’t know how the Wii Balance Board picked up the fact that I was flapping my arms when only my feet were touching the device. But, flapping as hard as possible to reach the platform targets and then slowing down to land tired me out and made me want Nintendo to announce a new Pilotwings for the motion-controlled system.
