Weight Loss with Nutrisystem and the Wii

I’ve had a copy of 10 Minute Solution for Wii for quite a while now. I noticed a lot of people on Amazon leaving less-than-stellar reviews, but their reviews mostly seemed to reflect their initial reactions to the game. So I thought I’d play it myself for a few weeks to make sure I gave it a fair shake. Here’s what I found.

As most people know, 10 Minute Solution is a highly popular set of DVDs where you can start and finish a complete exercise routine in 10 minutes. The DVDs each feature a fit and attractive fitness expert on a mat demonstrating different aerobic workouts to you, shouting out instructions and encouragement each step of the way. The way the series works, you can do one 10-minute routine each day, or you can string together multiple routines to make a more rigorous workout. There’s an astounding variety of aerobic exercises across the different DVDs.

This, of course, seems like a great concept to convert to a video game. And so when I heard they were coming out with 10 Minute Solution for the Wii, I was wondering if they could capture the magic of the video series.

Unfortunately, the answer is…not really. Aside from the name and the fact that exercises are broken into convenient 5-minute chunks, the routines bear little resemblance to the ones that made 10 Minute Solution videos so popular.

To show you what I mean, here’s an excerpt from one of the DVDs:

I think what made these videos work is their simplicity–one workout trainer standing in front of a video class on a mat and giving instructions on how to do a variety of interesting exercises, step-by-step.

On the other hand, 10 Minute Solution for Wii seemed to eschew the simplicity and the formula that made the DVDs so popular. Instead of the feeling an intimate one-on-one training session with an instructor, it feels like the standard kind of Wii fitness game we’ve seen before, like Gold’s Gym Cardio workout, where you just perform a series of repetitious actions with your balance board or Wii remotes to on-screen cues.

You can choose to have “an instructor”, but instead of an instructor with lots of personality shouting out specific unique moves for you to do, you get an amorphous, faceless on-screen animated character that’s typical of these kinds of games.

You do have the option to choose the instructor’s voice (“male or female” and “helpful or bossy”). But even so, the voices really don’t have any personalities themselves. The ‘nice’ woman’s voice is just a bit too sweet and bubbly, complete with the meaningless and repetitious “Yeah! Way to go! Have you done this before?” kinds of encouragement that are typical of Wii games. On the other hand the “bossy” woman’s voice sounds just plain sarcastic, like a cranky middle-aged person who’s smoked a few too many cigarettes in her lifetime–after two minutes of listening to her, I just wanted to jump out the window. The men’s voices are a little better, but similar.

When compared to the instructors on the 10 Minute Solution video series, who are all very pleasant and encouraging, the voiceover actors they used left a little to be desired. Thankfully, there is an option to turn them off altogether.

I suspect that most negative reviews are from fans of the 10 Minute Workout series who were expecting more of the “personality” of the DVD series comes to through in the game, but perhaps didn’t find it.

But having said that, I’ll be focusing my review of the game strictly on its merits as a fitness and exercise game. And in this area, it is a very solid title.

Much like My Fitness Coach, you can select a male or female trainer, music from a set list of generic tunes, and the environment you’ll be working out in (you can choose from a Chinese courtyard, Venice, a Japanese tea garden, a beach, a middle eastern palance, and a gym). The graphics are very well done, and I appreciate the subtle details that help keep the exercise interesting (such as a plane flying outside the window of your gym).

There are basically two different varieties of exercises you can do with your virtual trainer: cardio boxing or step aerobics. For each, you can choose from six different workouts ranging from simple (one star) to advanced (three stars). You’ll find the one-star exercises are far too easy; you hardly break a sweat. On the other hand, you will get your money’s worth with the three-star exercises. When I filmed these videos of the three-star exercises in the game, I got a great aerobic workout, complete with sweating, increased heartrate, and a great feeling afterwards.

There is also a category called “mixed games” which allows you to control your on-screen character in one of four sports simulations: volleyball, badminton, catching a frisbee, or fighting with pugil sticks. As with games like EA Sports Active and The Biggest Loser, you’re not really playing the sport itself–you’re performing a series of cardio boxing or step aerobic moves, and if you hit the moves precisely your on-screen character performs the sports task. So while the “sports exercises are pretty much the same as the standard exercises, it does add a nice bit of variety.

Each exercise is precisely 5 minutes each, so you basically put together your own 10 minute workout each day by choosing two exercises from the sixteen choices.

As far as comparisons go, there are going to be two obvious ones: How do the step aerobics compare with Wii Fit, and how does the boxing compare with Gold’s Gym Cardio?

Until now, there’s really only been one decent title with step aerobics that uses the balance board: Wii Fit (you know, the game where your Mii steps on the balance board to the “plink, plink, plunk” sound). This is one area where this game shines. The three-star step aerobics has you doing lunges, squats, and fast-moving splits that are far more complex than in Wii Fit, and all clearly demonstrated with animated footprints on a small image of the balance board. And the pace is more “plinketyplinketyplinkety”. So I’d say it’s a step above Wii Fit (no pun intended).

As far as the boxing, the game has you doing crosses, hooks, jabs, and uppercuts at a really quick pace. As with Gold’s Gym Cardio, a series of icons will scroll upwards, and you need to perform the boxing move when the icon hits a little square. But in many ways it surpasses Gold’s Gym Cardio. For one thing, the beat of the music actually matches your punches (what a concept!). I also love the fact that you can use two Wii remotes instead of a nunchuk–this makes your movements much, much more accurate. The only thing I had trouble with was the “bob”, but a little practice helped (you basically need to lunge down AND up all while the icon is in the green square).

As with all these kinds of games, you get out of it what you put into it. For example, in the boxing, if you shuffle your feet around while punching, you’ll get a great aerobic workout. Similarly, with the aerobics, if you have a pair of hand weights and move your arms, you’ll enjoy a complete workout.

One of the things I like most about this game is its simplicity. A lot of other Wii fitness games try to stuff in a bunch of fillers and nonsense, such as recipes (who in the world has a Wii set up in their kitchen?) and dressing up the on-screen characters, all to justify a higher price tag. With 10 Minute Solutions for Wii you have three choices from the startup screen: an instant workout (which picks a 5-minute workout for you randomly), a custom workout (where you can pick and choose two 5-minute workouts to make one 10-minute workout), and a fitness plan (where you can mix and match activities for each day of the week for anywhere from a 5-minute to a 30-minute workout each day). I applaud Activision for not being tempted to stuff gimmicks in, and for making the list price a very affordable $19.99.

I also like the fact that each exercise routine is exactly 5 minutes long, no more, no less. As with the video series, there’s something nice about having that kind of consistency.

The game is not perfect, of course. There are little glitches here and there. One example is if the Balance Board shuts off, which is always does, the game tells you to change the batteries. But overall, I’d say it’s a solid exercise game. It doesn’t really add anything new to the genre, but it does a nice job of executing the basics and correcting some of the flaws that its predecessors have.

Again, be sure to go in with the right expectations. It’s not the video series, and it’s not a $59.99 game, so as long as you don’t compare it to either of those, you have a pretty solid and very affordable Wii fitness game to add some variety to your workout routines.

And so, I’ll give the title a solid four stars. I almost see it as the last entry into the “first generation” of video games that started with My Fitness Coach, and continued with games like Wii Fit, EA Sports Active, The Biggest Loser, Gold’s Gym Cardio, Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum, and Your Shape. I like that Activision brought accurate controller response (as long-time readers of my reviews will know, this is my biggest pet peeve), and simplicity to the genre.

I see this Fall’s introduction of Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move, along with the new wireless EA Sports Active II for the Wii, as the beginning of the “second generation” of Wii fitness games. In many ways, Wii fitness games are starting to all look like each other, and I see the new innovations and competition being a very good thing for the genre. And of course, I’ll be keeping you up to date here!

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Note that since writing this review, it’s been pointed out to me that 10 Minute Solutions for Wii has its own YouTube Channel here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/10MinuteSolutionWii#p/a

For me, this is exactly what was missing. Activision did a very smart thing and filmed their cover model Jessica Smith (who in all respects fits the description of a 10 Minute Solutions instructor I described above) demonstrating the proper form for some of the basic moves that need to be performed in the Wii game, including switches, lunges, squats, and boxing moves.

When the videos on this YouTube channel are used in conjunction with  the game, it obviates some of the initial concerns I had with the game. Here are the videos for your reference:

Simple Switches:

Squats:

Boxing Tips:

Lunges:

I’ve actually had Ubisoft’s My Fitness Coach 2: Exercise and Nutrition since it was released back in January. But after seeing the awful reviews on Amazon, I was admittedly not in any particular rush to pop it in the Wii.

The original My Fitness Coach was a pioneer in Wii exergaming which enjoyed a very long stay on my Top 10 list. Wii Fit had been around for a few months, but for all the hype around it, people just weren’t getting fit from it. It seemed more like a fun set of games than a serious exercise program. With My Fitness Coach, which was actually a port of an old Playstation 2 game called Yourself!Fitness developed by Respondesign, you had your own personal trainer who customized workouts based on your needs, you had over 500 calisthenics exercises to choose from, and you could even customize your music and your workout environment, all things which you could never do before. The exercises didn’t really make use of the Wii’s capabilities, but it didn’t matter much because with the calisthenics, you could get a very good cardio workout. One thing I liked the most about the title was the running bar at the bottom which told you which exercise you were working on and which one was coming next.

All told, My Fitness Coach sold over 1.89 million copies and no doubt raised the eyebrows of people in boardrooms from EA to Nintendo. And so, like most fans of My Fitness Coach, I was looking forward to seeing what Ubisoft would do with the sequel. I figured they’d take all the best parts of My Fitness Coach and make some improvements.

Well, what happened next was really a series of flubs by Ubisoft’s marketing department.

The first mistake was that they decided to take a completely different game developed by Lightning Fish in the UK called NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer and to hastily release it in the U.S. as “My Fitness Coach 2: Exercise and Nutrition”, obviously hoping to cash in on the name. The problem is this new game bore absolutely no resemblance to the original My Fitness Coach. This terrible decision led to a number of problems.

First, fans of the original game and its in-game trainer Maya were completely disappointed. The expectation with any sequel is that the best parts of the first game are retained, and improvements are added on to the experience. But instead, My Fitness Coach fans were subjected to a completely different and foreign experience (literally, as you’ll see below). Simply put, Ubisoft didn’t respect the intelligence of My Fitness Coach fans—assuming they’d purchase any fitness game thrown in front of them without question. The fans responded by rejecting it flat out. Case in point: The average review of NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer on Amazon.co.uk is 4/5 stars (with an average critics’ review of 7.8/10). The average review of My Fitness Coach 2 on Amazon.com is 2/5 stars. Exact same game, but Black Bean did their own marketing in the UK, while Ubisoft did the marketing in the US.

Another flub made by Ubisoft was how they pushed Respondesign, the developer of the original My Fitness Coach, to develop the game Your Shape. It would have been a worthy successor to My Fitness Coach except for two things—two things which all but ruined both it and possibly the Yourself!Fitness and My Fitness Coach legacy along with it. Respondesign had to use a Ubisoft-developed USB camera to track movements (something Microsoft spent years and millions of dollars trying to perfect with Project Natal, why Ubisoft felt they could do it faster and a lot cheaper is beyond me—it certainly didn’t work), and they forced the loud and annoyingly perky Jenny McCarthy to replace Maya, the virtual personal trainer everyone loved, as the on-screen personality.

The third negative consequence is that people who may have been new fans of the NewU series in the United States never got a chance to embrace the new brand. Lightning Fish Games has since launched a well-received sequel to NewU Fitness First focusing on Yoga and Pilates, which Black Bean has released in the UK. But Ubisoft has painted themselves into a corner. If it takes off in the UK, should they bring it to the US as My Fitness Coach 3? Your Shape 2?

Anyway, now that my ranting is out of the way, I figured that I should provide an unbiased review of the game that should have been called NewU Fitness First Personal Trainer, but was released in the US as My Fitness Coach 2.

The first thing I did when starting up this game was to forget everything I knew and liked about the original My Fitness Coach. Forget Maya, forget that I could use exercise equipment in my workout, forget the gauge which told me my progress, forget that I could choose from 500 different exercises, forget fitness tests.

Having said that, the game on its merits is really not as bad as the poor reviews on Amazon indicate.

When you first start up the game, you’re brought to a colorful startup screen with five options: My Plan, Express Workout, Challenges, Profiles, and Options.

My Plan focuses on a personal fitness plan that you can create for yourself. It has four sections: Fitness, Nutrition, My Progress, and Lifestyle Tips.

When you select Fitness, you can either do today’s workout, preview tomorrow’s workout, show your progress, change your workout scenery (you can choose between a beach, a green meadow, a snow-covered mountain, or a gym), or change your trainer (you can choose between two men or two women—they’ll do the workouts on-screen with you as you do them and make faces and gestures in response to your progress). The daily workouts are extremely short. This could be a good thing if you’re in a hurry (in fact, there a new game called “10 Minute Solution” from Activision that will target this market). But it’s frustrating if you were expecting the kind of 20-to-30 minute continuous cardio workout you get from the original My Fitness Coach.

When you select Nutrition, you’ll see a handy collection of recipes of healthy food you can cook. While this is very well and good, I have the same complaint I have about this as I do when I saw it in other games like The Biggest Loser. Who in the world has their TV and their Wii set up in the kitchen? You can’t even connect a printer to the Wii to print out these recipes. And so as good as the recipes look, they’re not very useful if you need to copy them on a piece of paper (as with the grocery list they provide for this week’s meals). Worse, while Ubisoft evidently re-programmed some parts of the game to suit an American audience (I presume the voices of the trainers were British at one point, but they overdubbed them with American accents—I personally wouldn’t have minded if the voices stayed British), they forgot to change these pages. As a Yankee, I have no idea how many 14oz of potatoes are or how hot the oven should be if I set it to 200C/Gas Mark 6. I could have done without this section.

Lifestyle Tips are basically 2-3 sentence tips, mostly nutritional trivial about different foods. Interesting reading, but I question how many people are going to sit through to read on the Wii. As with similar sections on Jillian Michaels and The Biggest Loser, these games would do much better if they used the interactive capabilities of the Wii rather than just plopping a book for someone to page through. For example, how cool would it be to incorporate elements from a simple cooking game to teach about nutrition and healthy cooking?

The Express Workout section lets you choose from four quick workouts: a Quick Workout, a morning workout for Before Work, a midday Lunch Break workout, and an Evening workout for before bed. The exercises consist ofroutines such as marching, stepping on the balance board, hip swings, punching and dodging, and similar exercises that use the Wii remote and the balance board to check your progress (more on that below). All the workouts are short, around 10 minutes.

The Challenges section is, in my opinion, the best part of the game. There are five options: Dance, Cardio Test, Army, Boxing, and Baseball. It’s a little misleading at first, because I was expecting to do dance movements under Dance, baseball simulation under Baseball, etc. But what it really means is that it’ll do basic workout routines to exercise the muscles and build the stamina that a dancer, a trainer doing cardio work, someone in the Army, a boxer, or a baseball player would need. And unlike the short and simplistic exercises in the rest of the game, these challenges really make your heart pump and last a good long time for meaningful toning, muscle gain, and weight loss.

Of course, the most important question in an exercise is, how do the controllers respond? The quick answer is, they’re okay. They’re not as super-responsive as Wii Fit Plus is; on the other hand, unlike My Fitness Coach, it does use both the Wii remote and the balance board to track movements. And the responsiveness is a ton better than Your Shape or Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum, two games which woefully fall short in that department. I’ve pretty much come to accept that outside of EA Sports and Nintendo, game developers simply don’t have the expertise nor the inclination to make the Wii remote, nunchuk, and balance board very responsive.

What it is is a very rich and in-depth virtual environment where you walk around and explore, unlocking different parts of the world as you go. The virtual world is stunningly beautiful, with parks, beaches, ocean views, buildings, and trees. The time in the virtual world matches the real world time: during the day you can admire the vast blue skies with beautiful cloud formations; at night, you can walk under a starry sky.

In many ways, Konami was brilliant to focus just on walking as exercise. While this may not sound very exciting, keep in mind that studies have shown that sustained walking is one of the very best forms of exercise. 67 million Americans walk regularly for exercise, whether doing step exercises in a gym, walking on a treadmill, or just walking outdoors. With all the Wii fitness games out there, it’s a category of exercise that hasn’t really been done very well. All other games focus on things like boxing and running. Wii Fit Plus’s “Rhythm Parade” is good, but too short. Its “Step Aerobics” is also good, but just much too short.

Starting up the game is very simple. You first create a profile, choosing from a male or female character, and then customizing the color of his or her hair, skin, and clothes. I would have preferred to use my Mii character, but their anime-style character was good enough. Next, you input your birthdate, height, and weight. For the more bashful among us, you can also protect this information with a password. I was disappointed that Konami did not build in balance board support to measure my weight.

You then select the controller you want to use. You can choose one of three options: a Wii Balance Board, a Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad, or a Wii Remote and Nunchuk.

• The Wii Balance Board is the most straightforward controller. You stand with one foot on the left, one foot on the right of the board, and you just march in place to the rhythm to make your character walk.

• For me, the best choice for a controller is the Dance Dance Revolution Dance Pad. Like the Wii Balance board, you march in place on the dance pad to make your character walk. What’s nice about the dance pad is that it provides more flexibility. You can position your feet on any one of the six buttons on the dance pad, and you can even “mix it up” by moving your feet around to one of six positions. Unlike Dance Dance Revolution, you don’t have to stand on specific arrows: you can march on any button on the dance pad.
• The Wii Remote and Nunchuk can be used if you want to give you arms a workout or if you don’t have a dance pad or balance board. Just wave your right hand and your left hand to the beat to make your character walk.

You start out the game in a stadium on a track, where a tutorial will teach you how to interact with the virtual world. A soundtrack with upbeat music will play throughout your game, and you basically need to step in time with the rhythm (by default, you’re stepping to every beat, but if it becomes too fast for you, you can configure it to step to every other beat). There’s a visual indication in the upper left-hand corner of the screen of each beat, and every time you step exactly to the beat, you’ll see a “great” or “perfect” message, and you’ll collect a “chip”. Like Dance Dance Revolution, you need to be precise in your steps to get credit, but unlike that game you don’t need to place your feet on a specific spot; as long as you step anywhere on the mat you’ll get credit. Every time you miss the beat (or stand still) you start losing chips.

This is where the fun starts. You goal is collect as many chips as possible, and to use those chips to unlock various things in the virtual world, each one costing anywhere from 10 to 400 “chips”. As you walk through the world, you’ll see icons with a point value. If you have enough points, clicking on the icon will replace the icon with the actual item. If you click on an icon before you’ve earned enough points, the icon will be moved to the top of the screen and will be unlocked as soon as you earn enough points.

Among the things you can unlock:

• 120 songs
• 69 route branches (arrows that open up new parts of the map for you)
• 3346 town elements (ranging from trees to fire hydrants to cars)
• 24 magical clocks (which allow you to change the time in the virtual world, regardless of what the time in the real world is)
• 12 zodiac signs (constellations which appear in the night sky)
• 7 rainbow spheres (which will make a rainbow appear in the day sky when all are collected)

As you step, your character will walk through the island. As you come to crossroads, you’ll see arrows that point you in different directions, which you can point and click (or use the Wii Remote arrow button) to take. Certain arrows need to be unlocked before you can take them.

As for the music, throughout the game you need to click on icons that look like CDs to unlock new songs. I find that I wanted to use all my first couple hundred points on unlocking enough music to avoid the music from repeating. There’s a great mix of licensed songs from artists like The Black Eyed Peas, Demi Levato, and Ne-Yo, as well as a number of the kind of generic-yet-peppy stock songs from Japanese composers you might have heard on Dance Dance Revolution. As each song is playing, you’ll see the name of the song and its tempo in the lower left-hand corner of the screen.

After unlocking all the music I could find, I spent the next couple hundred points on unlocking parts of the map. I then became obsessed with unlocking all the scenery. Some of the scenery adds beauty to the scene, while others are actually functional (for example, unlocking street lights will brighten up the scene when you’re walking at night). With thousands of items to unlock, that’s a lot of steps you have to take. But the thrill of “earning” your points and then spending them to create your own little world really does make the time go by quicker and more enjoyable than if you were just walking on a treadmill staring into space.  Konami did a good job of taking elements from video games (collecting points, cashing them in, building your interactive world).

Throughout the experience, your virtual trainer will pop in to give you training tips (for example, if you overdo your exercise, she’ll tell you to slow down), give you instructions, and shout out encouragement.

So bottom line, is this a good title for exercise? My answer is an emphatic yes. It won’t give you the kind of high-impact, heart-pounding aerobics that a title like EA Sports Active or My Fitness Coach will give you, but it is a nice way to mix things up and add a pleasant, enjoyable component to your Wii fitness regimen. It’s the perfect way to work out for rainy days or days when there’s 20 inches of snow on the ground outside!

By the way, thanks to Karen and “L” for posting comments on the Best Wii Fitness Games page to tip me off to review this great game!

The exercise game from Ubisoft I had most been anticipating this year was Your Shape. As you can see from the review of Your Shape on the blog, I was less than impressed. Apparently, Ubisoft felt that in order to compete with EA and its Resistance Bands and Nunchuk Leg Strap and Nintendo with its Balance Board and MotionPlus, it had to introduce its own peripheral. So, it valiantly tried to introduce a Webcam which did a horrible job of tracking movement.

Ironically, the best exercise game of the year so far is by Ubisoft, but the only controller it uses is one, count ‘em, one Wii remote. And it’s not an exercise game at all. It’s called Just Dance, and it’s a winner. I placed an order for the game after Dianska mentioned it in the comments section of the best Wii Fitness Games page, and I’ve been particularly looking forward to it after reading positive comments from Partingsorrow and Mindy.

I admit, I wasn’t expecting much when I first heard about Just Dance a few months ago. I figured it’d be just like another one of those games like Dancing with the Stars and High School Musical where you see characters on screen dancing, but all you’re doing is waving your remote to match the visual cues on the screen. Ho Hum.

The first thing that struck me when I popped the game into the Wii was that these were fun songs from every era. They’re all family-friendly, and there’s something in the track list for everyone, from baby boomers to Gen X’ers to Gen Y’ers. Here’s the entire track list. Most of the songs are not covers, but original tracks from the original singers.

• Girl Just Want to Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper
• Ring My Bell – Anita Ward
• A Little Less Conversation (JXL Radio Edit Remix) – Elvis vs. JXL
• Cotton Eye Joe – Rednex
• Surfin’ Bird – The Trashmen
• Heart of Glass – Blondie
• Womanizer – The Gym All-Stars
• Groove Is in the Heart – Deee-Lite
• Jerk It Out – Caesars
• I Live to Move It (Radio Mix) – Reel 2 Real feat. The Mad Stuntman
• Not N Cold (Chick Version) – Katy Perry
• Mashed Potato Time – Dee Dee Sharp
• Girls and Boys – Blur
• Fame – In the style of Irene Cara
• Lump – The Presidents of the United States of America
• Kids in America – Kim Wilde
• Pump Up the Jam – Technotronic
• I Get Around – The Beach Boys
• Le Freak – Chic
• That’s the Way (I Like It) – KC and the Sunshine Band
• Louie Louie – Iggy Pop
• Funplex (CSS Remix) – The B-52s
• Jin Go Lo Ba – Fatboy Slim
• DARE – Gorillaz
• Bebe – Divine Brown
• Eye of the Tiger – Survivor
• Can’t Get You Out of My Head – Kylie Minogue
• Acceptable in the 80s – Calvin Harris
• Who Let the Dogs Out – Baha Men
• Wanna Be – Spice Girls
• Step By Step – New Kids on the Block
• U Can’t Touch This – MC Hammer

The second thing that impressed me was that this game features actual dance moves to the songs. In other words, not only are you playing the game, you’re learning actual dance steps. You’ll learn the “Mashed Potato” that was all the rage in the 1960′s to Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time”. You’ll learn the bestd disco moves of the 70′s with songs like “That’s the Way I Like It”. And my personal dream come true–you can make your own “Hammer Time” with “U Can’t Touch This” (parachute pants not included). You can’t do Dance Dance Revolution steps at a wedding (ahem, not that I’ve tried), but you can bust these moves.

Admittedly, the one thing I was skeptical about when I first saw the game was that it only used one Wii remote. That’s it. No nunchuk, no double Wii remotes, no MotionPlus, no balance board, no camera. They went for a decidedly simpler approach. For using one Wii remote, the controls are pretty accurate as far as detecting whether you’re dancing correctly or not. For each move, you’ll be given a grade of “Great”, “Okay” and “X”.

Now, I won’t lie and say the controls are the most precise in the world. There’ll be plenty of times you’ll be doing the moves precisely, but the Wii will tell you you’re not. But where this game triumphs is that even though the controls may be off, the game is so fun that you really don’t care. You’re not really “scolded” for getting an “X”. This is a refreshing change from other games like Your Shape or Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatim, where I swear I want to put my fist through the TV each time Jenny McCarthy or Jillian Michaels yells at me when they should be yelling at the people who programmed them.

And you also find that the more you practice the moves and “feel the music”, the better your scores become. You may never get to 100%, but you learn to take 60% to 70% “Great” or “Okay” as a major accomplishment. Here are some hints to improve your changes:

1. It helped me to remove the Wii MotionPlus from the Wii remote so it fit in my hand.
2. The best position for the sensor bar was at waist level so it could detect a full range of movement up and down.
3. It helped me to try to make sure the front of the Wii remote was facing me (i.e., the back was to the sensor bar) through the whole game. 
4. Before you start playing the game, move your Wii remote around to see where the boundaries of the cursor go. Try to keep your movement within these boundaries.  
5. Timing is everything. Practice until you learn the moves, and then be very precise when making them. Your right hand should be exactly where the character’s left hand is; if its hand is high above its head, make sure yours is too; if it’s at its hip, make sure yours is too, and so on. And it’s just as important to keep still in the parts you’re supposed to keep still as it is to move in the parts where you’re supposed to be moving. If you’ve gotten to the point where you’ve memorized the dance and are just doing the moves to the music, your score will be great.

The game is simple. You choose a song, and then after a countdown from 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, you’ll see a silhouetted character on your screen doing the dance moves. The character is generally dressed appropriately for the song: a disco dude will lead you through “That’s the Way I Like It”, a cowgirl will do a two-step to “Cotton Eye Joe”, and a dog (yes, a dog) will dance to “Who Let the Dogs Out”. You basically just have to do the mirror image of the character’s moves.

Oh yes, the exercise value. With virtually every song, I ended it panting because I was out of breath. Now granted, because it only uses the Wii remote, you could probably “cheat” by flicking your wrists at the right points. But why would you want to? It’s a blast to learn the real dance moves, it’s hugely entertaining when moving your whole body the way it’s supposed to be done.

To sum up, Just Dance is an instant classic “exercise game that’s not called an exercise game”. And even though I was constantly out of breath, I invariably still wanted to try it again and again until I got it right. To me, that’s the sign of a great exercise game.