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.

That’s a good way to describe We Cheer 2 by Namco-Bandai. The primary audience for the game is quite obviously girls from ages 7-15, but it can certainly be enjoyed by people of all ages. The We Cheer world is a bright, colorful world with wide-eyed cartoon cheerleaders with big eyes and bubbly giggles. The music is licensed and recognizable music from such teen pop stars as Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato, Avril Lavigne. Even Fergie’s “Glamorous” is the “Clean Version”. You definitely won’t find suggestive moves or skimpy outfits, it’s all very family-friendly. Grown-ups probably won’t have as much fun as the youngsters outfitting their characters with pom-poms, outfits, and every hair color of the rainbow, but kids will love it.

Unlike the last version, you also have option to play as a male character, although after playing a few minutes as a male character, I had to stop. I’m not sure why the artists opted to make the male characters awkward and effeminate as opposed to the more athletic guys you see at real college basketball games, but let’s just say after a few minutes even I wanted to beat my character up in the hallway.

As far as the game play goes, I was very impressed. The best way I can sum it up is the same way I summed up the Wiiware game Helix–it’s a lot like Dance Dance Revolution for your arms and hands. You hold the Wii remotes in your hands like pom poms, your on-screen character will dance in a cheerleading routine, and your job is to mimic her moves as closely as possible, with on-screen arrows and animated “timing star” showing you the precise moves you need to make and the speed you make them in. If you’re feeling adventrous, you can even turn off the visual indicators and simply follow along with actual movements of the characters on the screen.

If you follow her moves precisely, the screen says “Cool!” and you hear a jingling sound. If you miss, the screen will say things like “too fast” or “too slow” or even “needs more energy”. The routines you follow are actual, choreographed routines, so this game is truly as close to a real cheerleading simulation as you’re going to get. Granted, you’re only scored based on your arm movements, but if you want a full workout experience, you can also follow along with all of the dance moves the on-screen character is doing.

Unlike other rhythm motion games, which involve only moving your hands up and down and from side to side, We Cheer 2 takes it to a whole other level. literally simulating an actual cheerleading routine. You’ll clap your hands, dance from side to side, tilt and twist your body, shake your virtual pom-poms, and twirl and wave your hands. The choreography is actually pretty impressive; after playing the game over and over again (especially on expert mode), you can literally dance a full cheerleading routine that rivals the kinds you see at high schools and colleges.

The original We Cheer, like Dance Dance Revolution, was touted just as good for exercise as it was for fun. With We Cheer two, they once again put an “exercise mode” under the “Training” menu. In it, your on-screen character will take you through a Jane Fonda-like aerobic workout, selecting exercise routines with names like “Cheer your Muscles” or “The Calorie Burn”. Each routine has a little story; in one case, a tubby guy approaches you because he gained a lot of weight from eating hot dogs while watching soccer games; in another case, a chubby brown bear (yes a bear) laments that he’s got a crush on a panda who won’t give him the time of day because he’s too fat (okay, whoever wrote the dialogue is not going to win a Pulitzer). As a nice touch, the characters will have different sob stories each time you play.

The exercise routine will start, with your character shouting out moves that you have to mimic (high kick! grapevine!). As you successfully mimic each move, the guy will “poof” in a cloud of smoke, revealing himself to be thnner and thinner. At the end, he’ll thank you for helping him get in shape, and you’ll see a report of your total workout time, “calorie points”, and workout success. The workout you get here rivals anything you’ll find in a “pure exercise” game, but is much more fun.

As far as room for improvement, I would have liked to see longer exercise routines (you have the choice between a 2 minute quick workout and an extended 4 minute workout). I also would have liked to see a lot more routines (you get four to start, but you can unlock others).

If there’s one wrinkle in this game, it’s the response of the controller. I should say that the controls are much more responsive and accurate than most other similar games before it, from Samba Di Amigo to High School Musical to Dancing With the Stars. With Wii Cheer 2, just as the authors of Helix did, Namco-Bandai made the very, very smart choice of eschewing the use of the nunchuk and instead using two Wii remote controllers to control the hand movements. This greatly increased the responsiveness of the controllers, although admittedly there was still room for improvement. The controls were spot-on when I was playing on beginning mode or intermediate mode. But when I moved to expert, it was admittedly a bit aggravating when I knew I was making the right moves, but the system just refused to recognize them. I suppose this is because in expert mode, the movements need to be so fast and precise, perhaps more than the Wii can handle.

If you’re having problems getting the controllers to respond, here are some things I did to improve it:

• The Wii system and the We Cheer 2 game have options to adjust the controller sensitivity and to calibrate the controllers respectively. Play around with these.
• Make sure your movements are exagerrated. If it tells you to raise your hands, raise them emphatically all the way you can. When it tells you to move your hands in a circle, make a full circle. Like a real cheerleader, be very deliberate in your movements, and make sure you follow the animated star precisely.
• Practice, practice, practice. You’ll have your best success when you’ve memorized the routines and do them precisely in real-time with the on-screen characters, as opposed to trying to match the on-screen cues. In the video you see above, I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me hours to clear the Expert mode for Miley Cyrus’ “Girl’s Night Out”. But what helped was that as I tried over and over again, I started to memorize the routine, and once I did that, it just became a matter of trial and error to find out which motions worked for which moves. For example, in the part of the song where the cheerleaders are “high fiving” each other, I eventually found that you need to move your arms and wrists in an arc, and to “snap” your wrists at just the right moment.
• In desperation, at one point I ended up removing the plastic cover from my Wii remote, and unplugging the MotionPlus controllers.
• The biggest thing that ended up helping me was to move the sensor bar under the TV, rather than over it.

Here are some other things I liked about the game:

• There are great options for multi-player play. You can play alone, you can have two players each holding two Wii remotes, or you can have four players each holding on Wii remote. It’s great fun to play with friends or as a family.
• The soundtrack contains a lot of recognizable, licensed songs which will excite any teen or tween girl in the house (and the rest of us who won’t admit we occasionally tap our feet to them), including artists like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Lady GaGa, Rihanna, and more.

To sum up, We Cheer 2 is a worthy successor to the original We Cheer, a lot of fun, and  great exercise to boot. While most Wii exercise games focus on lower body, but We Cheer provides a great low-impact upper body workout. Sometimes the best fitness titles are ones that aren’t fitness titles at all, because you end up playing the game over and over again to try to beat the game, without realizing you’re working out. The only gripes I have with this game is that I wish they had much more extensive “Workout mode” options, and I wish the controllers were a bit more precise for expert mode (it might have helped, for example, if they included MotionPlus support).

Still, at the end of the day I was impressed. It’s a game which can provide lots of fun, a good challenge, great fun as a group, and at beginning and intermediate levels at least, the motion controls are spot-on. Highly recommended especially for girls in their teens and tweens, as well as adults who want a new and incredibly fun way to work out (and have a very good set of window shades :))

(Note: this review is based on a review copy of the game provided by the publisher)