Weight Loss with Nutrisystem and the Wii

GameFly announced today that every day throughout the month of September everyone who signs up for a pre-paid GameFly membership will automatically be entered in a sweepstakes to win free rentals for a year.

As I’ve written in the past, I love GameFly. With all the upcoming Wii Fitness games in the next few months, it’s a great way for me to try the games first before I buy it and/or share a review. I have a shelf full of games which I bought and which are just sitting collecting dust after I played them once or twice.

If you’ve been on the fence, no better time than the present to start!

If you haven’t been to Amazon today, check out the Gold Box:

They’ll have a couple Wii games for sale throughout the day with slashed prices, and at least a few will be games on our Top 10. As usual, they’ve used cryptic clues for most of the on-sale items, but here are my guesses for what they are:

Some of these will go almost instantly, so get on while the getting’s good!

If you’ve been using your Wii for exercise, one of the things you find is that you go through a lot of batteries. Just a few workouts swinging the Wii remote or stepping on the Balance Board will run your batteries dry very quickly.

Not only is it bad for the environment to be tossing all those Duracells and Energizers away every couple of weeks, it’s not all that great for your wallet either.

Personally, I haven’t bought an alkaline battery in the store for years. Instead, I got these Eneloops by Sanyo. If you’ve been disappointed by rechargeable batteries in the past, whether because they don’t last long or because they completely die very quickly, it’s time to give rechargeables a second look.

These batteries are different for a couple reasons. First, when you buy them they already come fully charged, just like regular batteries. Just pop them into your Wii and you’re good to go for as many hours as you could expect with regular batteries.

The magic happens when they run out. You just pop them into a recharger, and in a few hours you’ve got a brand new set. For me, I’ve charged and recharged my Eneloops so many times I’ve lost count, and yet they still keep a full charge. I actually keep two sets for each Wiimote, one to use in the Wiimote, and the other fully charged so I can swap them out. They say you can charge them up to 1500 times (3 years) before they start losing a charge–multiply that by the price you pay for batteries and you’ll realize how much money you’ll save. They even use arrays of solar panels to charge the batteries to full capacity at the factory before they ship–talk about being green!

The performance is actually superior to alkaline batteries and standard NiMH batteries.

Amazon sells the eneloop 4 Pack AA NiMH Pre-Charged Rechargeable Batteries as a set of four batteries.

You’ll need to purchase a charger as well, which you can get if you buy the Eneloop Power Pack with Battery Charger and batteries from Amazon (also available at your local CostCo). If you really want to go high-tech with the charger, consider a charger like the La Crosse Technology BC-9009 AlphaPower Battery Charger. (Although while this charger comes with batteries, I still prefer the eneloops).

Every once in a blue moon, Amazon has an all-Wii, all-day sale in the Amazon Gold Box.

For today and today only, Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution Hottest Party 3 is both the Gold Box item and the Amazon Video Game Deal of the Day. It’s available at the unheard-of price of $34.99.

Dance Dance Revolution is, of course, one of the perennial top 5 in our list of top Wii Fitness Games. Even with other companies putting out lots of new fitness games nowadays, there are still few Wii workouts as effective as jumping up and down on that dance mat.

Keep an eye for other Gold Box items throughout the day!

Ubisoft’s Your Shape is available for sale at Amazon.com for only $19.99. If you don’t have it, I’d say pounce on it while you can. The price makes it worth it if for no other reason than to get the USB camera (which you can use with your Windows PC as well as your Wii).

The game itself? Well, as I mentioned in a previous review (and my Amazon review, which you can see as the third one on the page) was honestly not the greatest game in the world. The workouts are great, but Ubisoft overreached a bit in thinking they could make a USB camera work as a precise Wii game controller (never mind that Microsoft is pouring millions and millions into making Project Natal do the same thing for Xbox).

Worse, if you read through reviews of this game, you’ll see lots of glowing reviews which were clearly fake, written by Ubisoft shills. Which is a shame, because Ubisoft is just hurting themselves and their own products’ credibility with practices like that. If they took the money they’re paying these people and put it into making more great games like Just Dance, they’d find that people would buy the games in record numbers without having to resort to misrepresentation. 

In any case, this game was an unmitigated ripoff at $69.99, its price when it came out. At $19.99, it’s a nice deal. Get it while you can!

Today (and today only), The Biggest Loser for Wii is Amazon’s Video Game Deal of the Day. What this means is you can get it for the low price of $28.99.

Read my review of the Biggest Loser for Wii here. All in all, a decent enough game to mix things up in your Wii workout, especially for under $30.

There’s a great deal going on for the original EA Sports Active at the EA Store.

The game is currently on sale for $43.54 at the EA Store.

It comes with the original EA Sports Active game, the leg strap, and the resistance band. You can read my original review of EA Sports Active here.

You can use coupon code PAXEAST842 to reduce the price an additional $20, for a total price of $23.54.

If you’ve been on the fence about this one, and need to start exercising before Fall of 2010, you won’t find a better deal for this one. But hurry, I have the feeling this one won’t last long…

As I wrote in my review of Active Life Extreme Challenge, it’s not the best game, certainly not better than its predecessor, Active Life Outdoor Challenge. 

Every day, Amazon features what it calls its “Video Game Deal of the Day”. Today (January 7, 2010), the deal of the day is the original EA Sports Active for only $39.77 (a discount of $20.22), a pretty good price for this one.

EA Sports Active on Amazon

While not as good as its successor, EA Sports Active: More Workouts, this one does include the accessories (the resistance band and the leg strap) which are needed for both the EA Sports Active Titles.

I guess Amazon is trying to move some inventory for video games before Christmas shopping period starts. They’ve got one of their great deals where you can buy $80 of games and receive a $40 promotional credit for a future purchase. But hurry, this deal is only good for purchases made between Monday, October 26, 2009 and Saturday, October 31, 2009

I’ve seen this done in the past, but the difference is that with this promotion they’ve got a lot of games which are listed on our list of top Wii fitness games, including Wii Fit Plus, Wii Sports Resort, The Biggest Loser, My Fitness Coach, Punch-Out!!, Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout, and Active Life Outdoor Challenge.

Here’s a link to the actual offer (which includes official rules and links to Wii, PS3 and Xbox games)

Here’s a list of Wii Games Eligible for this promotion