Last Saturday I finally received my copy of Wii Fit after tracking down several copies for a variety of people in my life; it is rare for me to find a game or peripheral for someone else before I buy it for myself but, since I always assumed it would be more of a rarely used add on for myself and they seemed very interested in it as a product, I let them have it first.

It has now had a full week of use, and I can honestly say that it far exceeded my expectations in how good of a “Work Out” it actually provides. I’m a fairly fit person, and I work out daily, and there are still things which challenge me in this little program; and its focus is very different from what most people do, so it could really augment even the fittest person’s workouts. With that said, I have one major complaint with its current design; and I would like to see one thing improved upon in the future.

The biggest flaw with Wii Fit in my opinion is that (at times) it feels more like Wii Menu Navigation than Wii Fit, and this results in the work-outs taking far too long. When you do an exercise you select it from a menu, get a secondary menu confirming the selection, the balance board is then initialized, you may get a warning message, your trainer may take a couple of seconds to chit-chat and you finally get to work out; after that your results are calculated, and you’re ranked before you select to quit or retry in a menu and are booted out to the initial menu. As a minimum, I would expect it to take a person 85 minutes to complete a 45 minute workout in Wii Fit ...

This user interface works fine for games like Wii Sports and Wii Play because there is less desire to get as much ‘Play-Time’ in as little time as there is with Wii Fit. My personal suggestion for this would be to have pre-programmed workouts (and allow users to create or download user created workouts) in order to limit the amount of menu navigation; and they should try to hide the balance initialization (as much as they can), and reduce the amount of time calculating score, and rework the ranking page to take less time.

The one area I would like to see expanded would be the tracking program and Wii Fit Channel. Ultimately, it should be treated (to a certain extent) like accomplishments in that all games should be able to use it to track a person’s fitness. It is one of the strongest things about Wii Fit, and has massive value even if people get tired of doing the exercises. It would be (really) nice for a user if every developer (Wii Ware or Disc) that produced a game for fitness purposes could be tracked in one unified place.

Anyways, I still think that Wii Fit is an amazing first attempt and sets the bar high for anything that follows it. If Nintendo takes people’s advice and improves upon Wii Fit it could certainly become a very good workout program and change how people see both fitness and videogames.

Edited because Cut-n-paste duplicated paragraphs

In my limited playing time, I had the same problem. I want to be able to design my own workout.

agreed with above. Having the option to set up a work out regiment would have gone along way. Currently I need to just increase my cardio and focus on Aerobics and Balance over strength. Having a workout option to set this up would be nice.

its my one complaint too, but once you get good at it, you can do a 45 minute workout in a bit over 1hr. depends on how good you get at it.

Hopefully third parties will step up to the plate for people wanting more advanced workouts.

Yes, yes, despite all the dribble about Nintendo making "non-games" and what not they're still very much a gaming company, and still approach even their expanded audience titles with the same gaming centric formats that have long become standards.

As you already pointed out, it works with Wii Sports and Wii Play because they're still purely games at heart. But WiiFit has the added angle of being a viable piece of an excercise routine, and those kind of video game staples are just hinderance for anyone wanting to use it for that reason.

If you pick an exercise from your favorites it seems to skip some (not all) of that nonsense. But that's hardly enough. It seems like an option to set-up your own routines wouldn't have been hard to include. Just set-up a section where you pick which excerises in what order you want and name it and the game would just run you through them without stopping to go back to the main menu. Really annoying omission, I agree.

Can't help thnk Wii Music may be a response to this, as it sounds like they're going through great lengths to avoid many staples included in almost every video game.

Nicely put, apart from the duplicate sentences all over the place. I too would appreciate a more work-out centric user interface. The mini-workouts are rather good, but way too short. If they had expanded on those mini-workouts, and maybe made them challenges that needed to be completed to unlock some of the more advanced exercsies, that would have been good. And yes, I find there's too much user interface getting in the way of my exercises too.

Well, I think you exaggerate the amount of time wasted. I can do a 45-minute workout in easily under an hour. However, I usually use the longer workout routines (20 - 30 minutes), so someone selects a series of the shorter 2-minute routines is going to have a bit more of a delay I suppose.

I do, however, agree there is a level of frustration with being required to flip through so many menues. The amount of time between each exercise doesn't really bother me; I'd just like to be able to make one selection, put down my remote, and get ready to move.

It would be nice if Wii Fit included a customization option where you can select a series of individual workouts and save it as a workout routine.

I bought Wii Fit on launch day (last December here in Japan), and used it only sporadically for several months. I started using it daily at the beginning of July, and have lost 2.5kg.

i bought day 1 usa (~74 days ago). and am down 11lbs (~5kg),
no change in diet, the Only change is using wiifit to work out.

I agree with you 100%. Menu navigation is way too long. The "minus" button should allow us to skip whatever she says.