Konami’s new fitness game, Walk It Out!, definitely plays by those rules. As the title indicates, it’s a game about walking. Yes, you heard me, a game about walking. No, seriously. You play the game by walking.

Okay, it seems like a ridiculous idea, I know, but when looking for new Wii games recently, I noticed that the reviews for Walk It Out! on Amazon.com were for the most part very positive. So I decided to give it a try. I know from previous experience that walking is a good way to stay fit, and that I enjoy it. It’s easy, very relaxing, and if I do it often enough, my legs really shape up. But I dropped out of the habit for a number of reasons – kids, schedule problems, pollen allergies, bum knees that hate cold weather, etc. Walk It Out! let’s me get in a walk without having to worry about any of those problems.

The premise is simple. You walk in time to the beat of the music. As you walk, you accrue points, which you can spend on various floating icons that appear in the landscape around you. This landscape, by the way, is called “Rhythm Island,” and it has plenty of places to roam around in. The floating icons that appear all over the place will unlock either landscape items like trees, houses, gardens, or cars; new music tracks to walk to; different parts of the island to explore; different routes through the island; different times of day for the environment; constellations in the sky (if you happen to walk at “night” on the island); and different colors in a rainbow. The rainbow colors don’t cost you any points, but if you collect them all, a brilliant rainbow lights up in the sky and you’ll be able to see for the rest of your walk.

It’s a very simple game. You just have to walk in time to the music. The better your timing, the more points you earn. If you miss steps, you lose points. According to the game manual, you can walk using either Konami’s DDR dance pad, the Wii balance board, or by attaching the nunchuk to your wii-mote and then tucking it into a pocket. I have not bothered with that last method, since most reviews by people who have tried it say it doesn’t work very well. Instead, I’ve been using my DDR pad, and it works just fine (although in the course of an hour of walking, I find the pad tends to travel across the room and I’ll have to pause the game and move the mat to keep from ending up under the couch). Hubster tried the game using the balance board and said it was a little tricky at first, but after a bit he got the hang of it.

Once you get walking, it’s easy to get around the island. Direction arrows will pop up at various points, allowing you to select which route you want to take. Not all routes are open at the beginning, but you can earn new ones by clicking on their icons. If you’ve already earned enough points, that route opens instantly. If not, the route falls into a que at the top of the screen and you keep earning points toward it. Once you’ve earned the points, you can go back and select that route again and it will be available. And this is the same method for how you earn points toward anything else in the game.

You probably do want to play this game with the nunchuk attached, since that makes it easier to look around the island. Use the toggle switch on the nunchuk to pan left, right, up and down, and click the button on the front to return your view to normal. I use the cross button at the top of the wii-mote to select direction arrows while I’m walking, though you can also click on them by point the wii-mote at them and clicking the A button. Clicking on the floating icons is a bit tricky until you get used to it, but it only took me a couple of sessions to get very good at it.

I’ve been playing the game every morning for the past week, and I enjoy it a lot. I’ve been having a hard time lately getting up in the mornings to exercise because I just don’t have the energy to face a serious bout on Wii Fit Plus or EA Sports Active. Much as I love those games, I cannot seem to drag myself out of bed for them right now. However, I can convince myself to get up and walk in my own living room, and that makes this game a huge WIN in my book. I’m the kind of person who enjoys exploring various environments. I love that the game environment can reflect the time of day that I step onto the mat. If I’m walking at 6AM, I get to see the sun rise on Rhythm Island. Of course, as I unlock the various clock icons, I’ll be able to choose what time of day I want to walk, but having Rhythm Island in sync with the real day works for me. I also love the variety of the landscape. The first session of the game starts out in a stadium, but I was very quickly able to move to the town outside, the beach, local parks, and even cross the river to the farm land and mountain lookout beyond that.

Playing with a second player can add to the fun. Last night I set up a second DDR mat and a friend and I spent more than half an hour marching in place in the living room, and we had a good time! We moved like the world’s worst high school marching band ever, but we were having fun. Of course, when Pixie and Princess played, they weren’t quite as thrilled, since Pixie kept pointing the camera view into the ground just to annoy her sister. So choose your walking partner carefully.

Now onto the one question I’m sure everyone will ask about this game: is it really a workout? Well, you’re not going to work up the level of sweat you’d get with EA Sports Active or even Wii Fit Plus. However, you will burn calories (after a session, the game will even show you how many calories you’ve burned, along with the number of steps you’ve taken and the distance you walked). I know that after playing for a week, I certainly feel a difference in my thighs, hips, and calves, so my legs are definitely firming up. And like I said earlier, I wasn’t getting up to play Wii Fit Plus or EASA, but for Walk It Out! I have gotten up 7 mornings in a row at 6AM and burned calories. And if you have any doubts about whether a simple walk will help keep you fit, you might want to check out the Campaign for Walking.

In summary, it does seem like a ridiculous idea to have a game just for walking, but it’s worked for me and I plan to keep playing the game for many mornings to come.

Good on ya, Konami! Now be prepared to expand that game for next year, because I know I’m going to want more.

I ordered the game two weeks ago, looking for something a little different that I could add to my Wii workouts. I’d heard some mixed reviews on this game, but thought it would be worth a try, especially when I read one review that mentioned even their 3-year-old was able to play along. Being mommy to a 3-year-old who wants to play Dance Dance Revolution but can’t because she keeps accidentally stepping on all the wrong controls on the dance pad when I try to navigate the game, this made Just Dance particularly interesting to me. I figured I’d get a game I could play with the kids in the evenings while getting a little physical activity in.

Well I got more than I bargained for! The day we got Just Dance, I popped it into the Wii and told the girls to grab Wii-motes. We went through the first four songs, trying out the game, and before I’d gotten through the second song, I was sweating. More than I sweat for DDR, even! Just Dance has players follow along as a dancer on screen goes through various dance moves to popular songs. The game to me straight back to the parties I used to attend in college, where a bunch of students all piled into one apartment living room and frantically danced their asses off until they collapsed sun-up the next day. The dance moves are terrific, and very energetic. Unlike DDR, where you have to hit the right spot on the arrow pad at the right time, you’re mimicking actual dance moves on the screen. The dance styles and music range from 1950s rock and roll to recent hits and dance moves. So far the girls and I have danced to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Ring My Bell,” “A Little Less Conversation,” “The Surfing Bird,” “Cotton-eyed Joe,” and “Move It!” (the theme song from the Madagascar movies). We love it!

Pixie, my darling 3-year-old, has managed to win a few rounds of the game even though she holds the Wii-mote in the wrong hand. She just gets up and shakes her little tushie and waves the Wii-mote around, and every now and then manages to hit enough of the moves just right to win. Princess is hooked on the game, especially since she thinks the dancer in “The Surfing Bird” looks just like one of her uncles (I have to admit, the guy could be a dead wringer for my brother-in-law). And me, I’m just tickled to have something fun that causes me to sweat that much!

We played the game Saturday night with Mich, a friend of ours. I was worried that we might be causing her to have a heart attack, but she was having a blast. Players are able to drop in and out of the game at any time in the “quick play” mode (don’t know about “challenge mode” yet), which meant we could swap off or take a break as we needed to. Mich and I did agree that next time we needed to be better prepared to play, by wearing sweats and sports bras. These dance moves are not under-wire friendly, and I seriously worried that I might bust a bra while busting a move.

Over all, I highly recommend the game. Yeah, it’s only got 30 songs, but they’re very cool, the graphics are a candy-colored acid trip, and you’ll work up a sweat while having fun. I’m thinking of playing the game in the mornings along with a short EASA workout, to combine strength and cardio in one session. I’ll let you know how it works!

Supposedly, the new EASA will also be able to download new content for the PSP version. No work yet on whether the Wii version will also be able to do so. I’m hoping so, otherwise Wii owners who play EASA will be up in arms.

Other improvements I’d like to see, but that weren’t mentioned in the article…

• More stretching exercises. A lot more stretching exercises, in fact.
• More warm up and cool down routines. The EASA More Workouts only has one routine for warm up and one for cool down, and doing those for six weeks straight got old real fast.
• Yoga routines. With the new wireless leg and arm remotes, I think this would be the ideal time for EASA to incorporate yoga into it’s workout options.
• Bring back some of the old games from the original version of EASA, including the baseball, basketball, tennis and volley ball games. I put together entire workouts that were nothing but those sports games and they gave me a real workout. I’d love to see them brought back.
• An option to pre-program EASA for a certain number of workouts a week based on what the user wants. The 6-week challenge demands you do 4 workouts a week for six weeks straight, which can be a little tough to work in if you do other forms of exercise during the week. I would rather have done 2 regularly scheduled workouts in addition to my water aerobics classes, karate classes, and other Wii workouts. Granted, I can still do that by picking the 6-week challenge workouts on my own from the menu and going through them in order, but the pre-programmed function would have been nice to have.

Keeping that last comment above in mind, I’m thinking of working EASA back into my morning workouts, maybe twice a week, interspersed between Gold’s Gym Cardio, Wii Fit Plus and DDR or the new Just Dance game that I’ve ordered. I don’t like to get bored, obviously, and mixing things up like this will give me plenty of ways to keep active.

If anybody has comments on working out with any of the above games, or with any games I haven’t mentioned, post them below. I’m interested in hearing what others have to say about working out with the Wii.

I’m talking about my exercise band snapping apart, of course. The original EASA came with a wimpy elastic band that I wore a hole in pretty quickly. It definitely wasn’t made to last. But I had a much heavier band on hand and was easily able to use that one with the handles EASA provided. It worked pretty well too, until Friday.

I was right in the middle of doing some squats when suddenly SNAP! The band ripped apart just a couple inches below one handle. The long end snapped right into my leg, thus the sting I mentioned earlier, while the left end just hung there, a now useless stub. I had to pause the game to fix the matter, swearing as I struggled to undo the handle from the short remnant of elastic band. When I had the handle reattached to the remainder of the band, the whole deal was a good six inches shorter. That was great for the exercises where I frequently had to double up the band to get enough resistance, but not so much for a lot of other exercises where the original length had been just right (i.e. providing enough to make me sweat). In fact, I’m seriously afraid that the band is no longer good for some exercises, like the shoulder presses, because too much stretching on the now truncated band may cause it to snap again.

Sigh. I guess I’ll hunt down a new resistance band, or a set of them, and maybe some extra handles too so I can swap back and forth between resistance levels. I’d like to find something sturdier than what I’ve been using, but I don’t know if I’ll have any luck with that. If I do find something, I’ll be sure to post a note about it here.

I’ve only got one more week left on the 6-week challenge, and I should be finishing up my final workout in that on Wednesday. Once I do, I’m going to evaluate the final results and maybe rethink my exercise routine. EA Sports Active has definitely provided me with a workout, but it may be time for a change.

Enjoy your Monday and go work up a sweat!

In order to compete 24 workouts in 6 weeks, I have to do 4 workouts a week (basic math, I know). And I thought that would be fine, especially with two of those workouts being done on days I don’t get any other exercise. But over the course of the last four weeks, a couple of things have happened. The first is that I was out of town at Marscon for three days and then came home entirely wiped out, so I missed my Sunday workout, and never got the chance to catch up on Monday. This is a real pain in the ass, because even now, a couple weeks after Marscon, I’m still one workout behind, and I can’t seem to find a day when I can sneak in a workout, because all sorts of screwy things have been going on with my schedule – parent/teacher conferences, prodding children to do homework, snow days, etc. Anything that interferes with me doing one of the two evening workouts I need to do forces me to do a makeup the very next day, which means I still haven’t caught up with that one workout session. And with 4 workouts a week, there are only 3 other days available to sneak in an extra workout. There is a reason why I didn’t choose those days to workout, and that’s because they are already full to the gills with other things to do!

So I’m behind by one workout and can’t seem to catch up. My second problem is that the workouts keep getting longer. As I progress through the 6-weeks, the sessions become more demanding, require me to do more sets and reps, and so on. I started out doing 20-25 minutes per workout, easy to fit into my schedule. Now I’m doing 30-35+ minutes a workout. Not so easy, especially when we once again look at those evening workouts. 10-15 minutes can be a huge deal in whether or not I get dinner on the table at a reasonable time, or manage to squeeze in story time with my girls before bed.

I’ve only got two weeks of the challenge left, so I will do my best to finish it, but I don’t think I will be doing another after this. I’ll have to wait until summer, when I my time is not as constricted by the demands of the girls’ school schedule and I can do more workouts in the morning. Actually that brings to mind a third problem, which ties into the other two – my enthusiasm is starting to wane. I hate exercising in the evenings, especially if the workout is tough. I’m usually dead on my feet by the time 5PM rolls around, and do not want to throw on my sweats and workout. As the workouts keep getting tougher and longer, I’m having to force myself more and more to stick with the program.

I know self-discipline is part of the challenge, but man. What I wouldn’t give to be able to set up a challenge that only required 3 workouts a week. Then I’d only have to worry about one evening workout, and that could easily be done on Friday, the day I’m least likely to be wiped out.

So, it looks like after this challenge, I’ll be doing something a little different with the Wii for fitness. I’ll probably still use EASA, but pick my workouts ala carte, and maybe throw in some Wii Fit Plus and Gold’s Gym Cardio Boxing, two other games I enjoy. In fact, I could easily see myself doing a session of each game once a week. That would round out my workout schedule quite nicely and combat the boredom.

But first things first. Finish up that 6-week challenge. We’ll see how I feel by the end of it.

Yes. Since Christmas, I’ve lost four pounds and I can definitely see more muscle definition. Even better, the new EASA doesn’t seem intent on destroying my knees like the old version was. A lot of the exercises that caused me so much pain have either been removed from the game or modified. So yes, this game definitely seems to be working for me.

However, I don’t believe I’m getting those results through EASA alone. Keep in mind, we are now past the holidays, which means I am also past the holiday eating. All those cookies, cakes, pies, candies, plus meat heavy meals are now three weeks behind me. I’ve since switched to eating two vegetarian meals a day, plus I’m drinking a lot more water. I’m not perfect at following these two rules, but I do them often enough that I think they’ve also had an effect on my health and weight. Plus I continue to take water aerobics classes and karate classes, both twice a week.

I think what’s worked more than anything is that I’m settled back into my old routine, with a little more emphasis on eating healthy and getting more exercise. Not being able to determine how the day would go over the holidays often meant I had no idea when or what I would be eating, so I ate a lot of junk and high fat meals as a result. I’d love to have more control over my schedule next year, if only so I could control my eating better. To do so, however, will probably mean I’ll have to make some changes to my schedule over all. Celebrating the holidays, in many ways, is like taking on an extra part-time job from October through December. To do all the things I’d like to do for the holidays – baking, decorating, sewing, parties, concerts, etc. – I’d have to cut back on my regular work during those months. It’s something I’ll have to think about before next October rolls around.

In any event, I’m enjoying the new EASA and the new eating habits. So far, I’ve cooked three vegetarian soups that did not suck, which means I’d cook and eat them again. In fact one of those soups, the carrot puree soup, was so good I’d make that any time and enjoy it.

So there you go, the secret to weight loss; healthy eating, plenty of water, regular exercise and a normal, livable schedule. Am I a genius for figuring out the obvious or what?

If you’ve been following Move It Mama Monday for a while, you’ll probably recall I had a love/hate relationship with the previous incarnation of EASA. I liked that the game included plenty of strength exercises, but I lamented its lack of cardio activity and the damage it seemed to do to my knees. After completing my one and only 30-day challenge with the original EASA, I wound up having to take 2-4 Advil a day for a week to deal with the knee pain I suffered. In the end, I pretty much shelved EASA in favor of Wii Fit, although by that point I’d played Wii Fit to death.

Well, out comes the new EASA, and so far I’ve completed 6 workouts on it in the last two weeks. I definitely think the new game is an improvement. For starters, all the preprogrammed workouts now include a warm-up and cool-down session to help loosen up the old joints. Many of the original exercises that caused me so many problems with my knees have either been replaced or reworked, although this game does still include a lot of jumping around and lunging, so be careful if you have bad knees. Many of the strength exercises have been reworked too, making them more effective and easier to do in my opinion. And the biggest change? The scenery. No longer are you stuck at the local park/track doing your workout. Now the game centers on a beach resort, which I think is an improvement.

For my first three workouts with the game, I picked sessions from the preprogrammed workouts menu. I stuck with either the medium or easy workouts, recalling how much I had hurt when I first started with the original EASA. The workouts at these levels are still intense enough to make me really sweat, which made me very happy.

On New Year’s Eve, I started my 6-week challenge. Apparently too many people (including yours truly) had trouble completing the old 30-day challenge within 30 days, so the time frame was expanded to 6 weeks. It’s still a demand on the schedule though, requiring 4 workouts a week to meet that 6 week goal. I can do it, especially since I’ve started doing shorter workouts in the evenings anyway, but if you’re already on a regular workout schedule with some other activity, you might want to think twice about the 6-week challenge.

I’ll keep you updated on my progress with my 6-week challenge (and once again, learning from prior experience, I opted for the medium intensity challenge, not the hard!). Meantime, here are a quick list of the pros and cons that I see so far with the new EASA.

Pros:

• The exercises I hated most, the ones that really killed my knees, appear to be gone or replaced by exercises that aren’t as painful to do.
• The new scenery is much nicer. Quite frankly, I was getting pretty dang tired of that park in the old game. If I’m going to work out in a virtual world, then I’ll take a virtual tropical island any day.
• The new EASA now uses the balance board to check your weight every week! And you don’t have to put up with any snarky attitude if you gain a couple pounds. The game just tracks your weight; it doesn’t try to destroy your soul (like a certain Wii Fit game that shall otherwise remain nameless…).
• There are some interesting new games, like squash, water skiing, an obstacle course, etc., that are fun to do.
• The challenge now takes 6-weeks as opposed to only 30 days. I can handle 6 weeks.
• No more freaky inspirational videos from Bob Whatshisface! I don’t know about you guys, but that very nice man who pimps EASA really creeped me out every time he showed up on camera. The way he grinned, I was afraid he was going to jump out of the TV and eat me!

Now for the cons:

• The game is still rough on the knees. I’m hoping that getting back into my regular water aerobics class will fix this. Water aerobics seems to go a long way toward strengthening the muscles that support my knees. I’ll need that to keep up with all the lunging and jumping that still shows up in EASA.
• The new EASA doesn’t seem to have “More Exercises” so much as “All New Exercises.” In other words, a lot of the old stuff is gone. While they updated and improved the boxing, I have yet to see the tennis, volley ball, or baseball games. I can’t say yet if those are really gone, but from comments I’ve seen on line, it looks like they may be. This would be a shame, because those were the games that I enjoyed the most on the original EASA.
• The warm up and cool down are the same for every single workout. I was hoping for more in the stretching department. Instead, every workout starts and ends out with the same exercises. That’s not just boring, it’s a waste. They couldn’t put together a few more warm up and cool down routines? How about more stretches for the arms and legs? Neck rotations even! Bah! I will never find a Wii game that really includes stretching.

And that’s about it. I’m hopeful that between my regular daytime workouts (water aerobics, karate) and regular evening workouts (EASA, Gold’s Gym Cardio, Wii Fit Plus), I’ll be able to get myself back into shape. We’ll see what the results are in a month, I suppose.

Next week, I’ll make a list of New Year’s health and fitness resolutions. I should have done that this week, but what can I say? I was just too danged excited about the new EASA.

I’ve done my damnedest to cut down the flow of messages that flood my in-box daily.  I’m only subscribed to those Yahoo groups that I need to belong to for professional reasons. Unfortunately, all the organizations and publishers I work with have at least two Yahoo groups to their individual names, and sometimes more than that. Then there’s the e-mails that go back and forth on individual projects. Those e-mails are all important and must be kept up with, but I’m getting so many right now. I’m starting to think maybe it’s time to scale back on my work. I mean seriously, I’m spending 1-2 hours a day on e-mail related to my work. Yes, I said 1-2 hours a day, people. Right now, I’m getting up at the ass-crack of dawn to spend two hours every day on the podcast and I’d like to spend an hour and a half in the evenings writing stories and books, but I’m struggling so hard to keep up with the fucking e-mail I can’t seem to make that schedule work.

Ugh. It’s enough to drive a person crazy. But there may be a solution. I’ve been limiting the amount of time I am allowed to spend on e-mail. I will only check and deal with e-mail during whatever hours I have free between 9 AM and 3PM during the week. By which I mean, unless I’m working out or drawing the Cynical Woman cartoon or having lunch, I’ll deal with the fucking e-mail. But come 3 PM, the e-mail gets shut down, and I will not, under any circumstances, re-open my e-mail until the next morning at 9 AM. And that’s during the week. On weekends, I will handle e-mail on Saturday for as long as I can stomach it, but on Sunday? Fuggedaboudit! No frikkin’ way am I check e-mail on Sunday.

So here’s the deal. You need to get a hold of me in the evenings, or on Sunday? You just dying to tell me something, or request something, or chit chat? You’ll have to catch me on Twitter. I’m on Twitter pretty much all day when I’m home. And I really like Twitter too. You know why?

Because tweets are limited to 140 characters, baby! And that’s a helluva lot easier to deal with the fuckin’ e-mail!

AUGH!!

I’ve been playing My Fitness Coach for the last couple of weeks, to give myself time to decide if I like it or not. My Fitness Coach is an apt title for the game, because it’s all based around a personal trainer character, Maya, who guides you through the workouts. Maya asks what equipment you have (balance ball, weights, step, heart rate monitor), how long you’d like to exercise (15, 30, 45, or 60 min), and what you’d like to focus on. The first time I played the game, I was prompted to take a fitness evaluation; pushups, sit ups, jumping jacks, stretching, etc. I was also asked to measure myself at various points, give a resting and active heart rate (that’s where the jumping jacks come in), and a few other odds and ends. Then Maya made a recommendation for what my primary workout goal should be. The game focuses on areas like cardio fitness, upper body, lower body, flexibility, etc. Maya will work you through all the areas, but the workouts will focus more heavily on whatever the primary goal is. You get the option to go with her recommendation or to choose your own.

After all that – the set up took about half an hour (yeesh!) – I was ready to workout. My Fitness Coach is just like having a real personal trainer put you through your paces. There’s a cardio warm up with the usual aerobics and step moves, then on to weight/resistance training and a little cool down and stretching at the end. After a certain number of workouts, it’s time to do another evaluation, and yes, you go through the whole schmiel all over again. I’ve been do 30 minute workouts three times a week since mid November, and so far had one re-evaluation. Do I like the game? Have I seen results?

Eh, to the first question, and maybe to the second.

Eh, because My Fitness Coach is almost exactly like having a personal trainer… but one you can’t really interact with. Maya does ask at various points in the work out how you feel. Was that section too hard, too easy, or just right? Then she stores that feedback for reference when building future workouts. But that’s about it for interaction. The game barely uses the Wii remote, and never uses the balance board. Although I wish it did use the balance board to at least check my weight during the evaluations.

Beyond that limited interaction though, My Fitness Coach is a lot like working out to an exercise video. It’s more varied, obviously, because the game switches up the workouts every time, based on the evaluations and the feedback. So it’s never the same thing twice. But it’s kind of dull, and the most I can stand to do is 30 minutes at a time.

Having said that, I get a solid workout in 30 minutes with My Fitness Coach. The warm-up segs right into a cardio session so I’m jumping and dancing around for 15 minutes or so. That gets my heart rate up pretty dang quick. So far, I’ve only been asked a couple of times to pull out the weights for the resistance training, which follows the cardio, but I’ve been using them anyway, otherwise I’m not getting any workout there, even though I’ve repeatedly told the program, “That was too easy.” Hopefully, Maya gets the hint soon. The cool down and stretching at the end last two minutes at most, but then I am only doing 30 minute workouts. But even on the days when I’m supposed to be working on flexibility, I’m still not doing a lot of stretching. Again, I keep telling Maya, “Bump it up a notch, bitch!” She’s slowly getting there.

So, results? Yes, I’ve seen some, but I honestly can’t say if it’s because I’ve been playing My Fitness Coach for the last month or because I’ve been doing water aerobics for the same period of time. It’s probably a combination of both. I do like that I’m getting plenty of strength training and that I don’t have to fiddle with an elastic band to do it (I’m lookin’ at you, EA Sports Active!). It’s much easy to follow along with weights in hand and the remote on the table. But then again, My Fitness Coach can’t tell me if I’m doing things right or not because it doesn’t use the Wii remote to get any feedback.

I will say that so far My Fitness Coach hasn’t killed my knees, but again this may be because it doesn’t rely on the feedback from the Wii remote to see if I’m doing the move exactly right. EA Sports Active did kill my knees, and doesn’t really allow me any way to modify the problem exercises to a level that’s comfortable for me (although it does let me skip them; My Fitness Coach doesn’t have that option).

I’ll stick with My Fitness Coach for a while, mainly because I had to make a commitment to do so many workouts a week. I’m slooooooooowly unlocking the new environments to work out in (another downside, there are so few goodies in the game for continued participation, and earning a new environment isn’t nearly as fun as earning new outfits to dress up your trainer in; I’m lookin’ at you, Gold’s Gym Cardio, and your hottie trainer Alex too!).

Honestly, so far, the best fitness game has been Gold’s Gym Cardio, although the focus there is almost entirely on the cardio. It’s fun, like Wii Fit, but it offers more of a heart thumping workout. EA Sports Active just kills my knees, although I do like the sports games and the ability to make my workouts or modify a premade workout. Wii Fit Plus spent too much damned time developing new mini-games and not enough time focusing on upgrading the cardio and strength training portions of the game. And My Fitness Coach is challenging, but dull.

With no perfect fitness game out there, what’s a gal to do? Continue to mix and match between the games I already have, and keep trying out new ones. At the very least, I’m getting some good variety in my exercise routine this way.

But on to today’s topic. A few weeks ago, I picked up a couple of new fitness games for the Wii. One of these was Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout. The premise behind this one is pretty simple. You “shape” box along to a routine presented on the screen and work up a sweat. There’s a trainer character who walks you through a tutorial on how to move, and then during the routine, he puts you through your paces while various punches and other techniques scroll up the screen ala DDR style. You can do the boxing either using a Wii remote and a nunchuk or by using two Wii remotes, one in each hand (the later is preferred according to the game manual). There are also a selection of gym exercises like push-ups, leg lifts, etc., that you can do. Some of these later exercises use the Wii balance board, but you won’t need one for the shape boxing, which is the meat of the program.

Once you set up your personal data – height, weight, age, and some basic fitness testing – you can start into the program with a few very basic routines. The routines run between 6-15 minutes. The higher up you go in training levels, the more techniques are included in each routine, so you’ll move from basic punching to bobbing and weaving and so forth. You have the option of doing an ala carte workout where you pick and choose what you want to do, or you can let your trainer choose a workout for you. One nice point, the trainer does ask you how hard you want to exercise when putting together a workout for you, so if you’re feeling a little on the blah side that day, you can take it easy.

After each portion of your workout, you’re given a count of how many punches you did. This is used to track your progress. The more punches you accumulate, the more “gold” you earn, which you can “spend” on clothing and other items for your character in the gym “store.” Also, as you workout with the program, you unlock the option of using other trainers and dressing them in different outfits as well. I had no idea why this last option would appeal until I earned a new outfit for the trainer I’d been using. I chose “Alex,” the bishonen hottie, for my trainer, and when I found I could dress him in just boxing shorts with no shirt, my interest in the game did shoot up. Nothing like looking at a half-naked virtual stud muffin while working out to get the old motivation going.

So, do I like the game? Yes. It’s basic, with the main focus on the shape boxing, but there are plenty of routines to work on and I have definitely been working up a sweat. The gym exercises aren’t really all that interesting, but they do provide some muscle building to a mainly cardio workout. The music is cheesy (in both the gym exercises and the exam portion of the game, they insist on playing an instrumental version of “Eye of the Tiger”), but it’s fast moving and I can choose what cheesy tune I want to box to before I start a boxing routine. Oh, and there are also 3 work out locations I can pick from while boxing – a beach scene, a dojo, and a gym.

Basically, there’s plenty of variety in this simple game and it burns calories and makes me sweat. I wish Wii Fit Plus had bothered to revamp their cardio boxing game, because it really is a great workout, but since they didn’t, I’m more than content to workout with Gold’s Gym Cardio instead.

Especially when I’ve got the option of working out with a half-naked bishonen hottie. Yum!