Dance Dance Revolution 3 for Wii, of course, is first a game and second an exercise title. But ironically, this is the thing that may make it more effective than any “pure” exercise title.

It continues to have the “fun” features which makes DDR so fun to play alone or with friends and family. The dance mat controller was the first and is still the best controller for accurate tracking of movements.

There are different modes to suit everyone from beginners to seasoned pros whose feet move faster than a hummingbird’s wings.”DDR School” provides an excellent tutorial for those getting started. “Tournament Mode” lets you compete in a “DDR Tournament” with different challenges (you can play yourself or with 3 others, but there’s no online support). “Training Mode” will take you step-by-step through any song you choose so you can practice particularly complex moves. “Relaxed Mode” is for those who just want to play without any pressure.

On a positive note, I appreciate the fresher track list with more recognizable music, and I like the fact that they use more actual videos from the actual stars. I also liked that owners of Dance Dance Revolution 2 could unlock costumes and songs with their saved data. I was a little disappointed that the songs and videos are abridged versions and that the soundtrack list was somewhat limited.

But enough about the game itself. The rest of this review will focus on how useful it is for exercise and fitness (i.e. “Workout Mode”). And in this area, it is a solid winner.

Konami invented exercise games before anyone knew what an exercise game was. Long before Wii Fit or Wii Sports, there was Dance Dance Revolution. Kids in malls and homes everywhere were doing 30 minutes of rigorous and sustained aerobic exercise without even realizing it, while their parents with their Jane Fonda videos hardly broke a sweat.

A lot of us had been using DDR for working out, but this version of DDR fully integrates exercise as a game feature, putting it right on par with other “exergames” like Wii Fit Plus and EA Sports Active.

When you start Workout mode, it’ll use the balance board to calculate your weight before you start working out. One nice touch is that after it takes your weight it doesn’t show it right away. Pressing the “A” button will toggle between the asterisks and your weight. A nice feature if you have others in the room.

You’ll be able to set a goal for your workout sessions. You can set a goal by play time (e.g. 30 minutes), or you can set it by the number of KCALS burned.

As far as the types of workouts, you basically have three options:

Standard: This is “classic DDR”, where you move your feet to the music, and in my book it’s still the best way to work out. Every song has four difficulty levels (beginning, basic, difficult and expert). I find that the “difficult” setting provides me enough of a challenge while getting my heart pumping and my body sweating.

Hypermove Mode: This is basically the same as Standard move, but also using the Wii remote and Nunchuks to move your arms. Here, I was not thrilled with the way the remote and Nunchuk are implemented. You need to wave your arms to the side making a rainbow-shaped arc, and to wave your arms to the front as if you’re casting a fishing pole. Even when you make exagerrated movements, the controls do not always register. I would have preferred Konami to do like Helix or We Cheer 2, and allow the use of two Wii remotes instead of the less responsive nunchuk. I also would have preferred more punching movements than arm movements

Balance Board Mode: Balance board mode is a new feature on DDR 3. In it, you stand on the balance board and bump your hips to the front, back, and sides; make punching movements with the Wii remote and nunchuk; and roll your hips like you’re hula hooping. For the most part the movements are accurate, but sometimes you need to exagerrate your hip movements to get them to register. Each song has two difficulty levels (basic and difficult), but even at its most difficult it’s not nearly as strenuous as using the dance mat controller. Still, it is fun, it does get your heart beat up, and it’s a good diverstion to provide some variety to your workouts if you get tied of Standard and Hypermove modes from time to time.

Some other nice features:

– One nice thing about Workout mode in general is that if you mess up, it lets you keep going. (You’ll just have to put up with the announcer saying “dancer needs groove badly”).

– For the Standard and Hypermove modes, you can select a menu option called “Cut”, which will limit any beats other than quarter notes. This will essentially make your workout feel like a step class. In Hypermove mode there’s also a menu option called “jump” which can turn off simultaneous step arrows (good if you have neighbors downstairs).

– For Standard and Hypermove modes, up to 4 players can work out together. There are a number of interesting multiplayer options. You can compete against each other for accuracy, or you can use “Friendship style” or “Sync Style” where points are awarded as a group.

– The “Diary” provides a great running history of the total calories you’ve burned, the average calories you burn per session, and the songs you’ve played.

Konami has continued to hold the bar high with every new release of Dance Dance Revolution. I’m glad to see they’re introducing new innovations and are fully embracing the “exergaming” craze. At the end of the day, the best way to exercise is to do activities that are so fun you forget you’re exercising.

Of course, what sets this title apart from the others is the inclusion of an “Innovating Motion Tracking Camera” to detect your movements. In actuality, this is just an ordinary USB Webcam. (Not exactly a technological revolution, but on the flip side if you don’t have a Webcam for your PC, you can use this one as a “free” one—I plugged it into my Windows XP laptop and it recognized it immediately).

Setup is a snap. You plug the camera into a USB port on the back of your Wii. When you put in the game CD for the first time, you’re prompted to perform a system update (presumably to install the driver for the camera).When you start the game the first thing you see is Jenny McCarthy giving a long laundry list of advice for how to set up your camera. Following these instructions will give you the best chance of success with this game but for reasons I’ll mention below, it may not be enough.

The video version of Jenny is then replaced with a slightly creepy animated version (with way too much computerized eye shadow on). An annoyingly frenetic, peppy cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” plays over and over and over again in the background, perhaps the game makers’ way of getting you to make your selections quickly.

Setting up your profile:

You start by setting up your profile. This works about the same as other games in the genre: you type your name, create an optional password, choose your units of measurement (not sure if people understand what “imperial” is, but it’s “not metric”), enter your gender and year of birth, and enter your height and weight. You still have to enter your weight by hand—in this day and age it’s inexcusable for them not to have added some balance board support.

Once you’ve entered all this, the game will turn on your camera and you’ll see yourself on the TV screen. From here, the system will “scan” your body and show an outline of your body. At first I thought this was amazing, but then I realized that the outline of my body was only just based on the height and weight I entered. In other words, the “body scan” is really nothing more than a gimmick. Its sole purpose is probably just to make sure your camera is in the right position.

You select a part of your body you want to work out: shoulders, arms, back, chest, glutes, or legs. For each of these, you can choose whether you want to burn, tone, and/or build strength. Ostensibly, your workout routine will be customized based on what you enter.

The Fitness Evaluation

The next step is taking you through an “evaluation”. Jenny will first ask you your current cardio level (sedentary, moderate, or active), as you how you’re feeling, and then send you through some typical exercises of the type you’d do in your daily workouts. And this is exactly where you start to see both the best parts and the worst parts of this game.

The first exercise is a warm up march. I loved how the on-screen animated Jenny is juxtaposed to your video image, so the two of you will literally make the same movements at the same time. Every exercise has an optional tutorial where you can learn how to do it; or, you can just mimic Jenny’s movements.

The first time I did it, it did a fairly amazing job at detecting whether I was moving my legs and my arms. And it wasn’t just looking for random movement on the screen—if I stopped moving my arms but not my legs, the screen would flash “Arms!”, and Jenny would also tell me to start moving my arms. “Okay”, I thought. “This is going to be cool”.

The next exercise was jumping jacks. This was a disaster. Not once did the system properly detect my arm movements. For hours I tried everything possible to get this working. I tried changing into different colored outfits, exaggerating my movements, changing the timing of my movements, standing toward the front and toward the back, and even changing the lighting in my room. Each time, Jenny would yell out “Uhp! Please check out your arms!” and the on-screen report of how well I was doing the exercise would always plummet. My percentage of correct exercises was always in the 30 percent range, even though I knew I was doing all the exercises properly.

The next few exercises were lateral raises, squats, plies with shoulder presses (basically an exercise where you move your arms and legs like a frog and move up and down), and cool-down stretching exercises. They were hit or miss as far as my movements being detected. Whenever it worked, it was amazing. But unfortunately, for every one time it detected my movements, it would fail several times.

At the end of your “evaluation” Jenny will then give you a letter grade, but chances are you won’t be happy, as your grade will be artificially low because the game couldn’t pick up your moves. Based on all the information you provided and your “fitness evaluation”, she’ll recommend a fitness calendar with preprogrammed workouts for the week. You can customize the days and the amount of time you want to spend exercising.

Daily Exercise

From there, you just start up the Wii every day you’re scheduled to exercise and click “Workout” to go to your prescribed workout session.

As other reviewers have said, from a pure exercise point of view, this title is really no different from Ubisoft’s previous title My Fitness Coach. The exercises are “old school” calisthenics moves with names like “double heel jacks” (jumping up and down while kicking your heels) to “turn steps” (walking to the left and right while turning and swinging your arms) to “grapevines” (walking to the left and right while swinging your arms and clapping). The package touts that it has “over 400 exercises”, but the truth is there are just 400 variations of jumping, swinging your arms, moving your feet, and stretching. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s a very complete set of workout routines.

On other positive notes, it really helps that you can see your own video image next to the animated Jenny, to see precisely how she does the exercise. And I do like the attention to detail, for example in how the on-screen Jenny will know “the weather’s getting cold outside” or that “mornings are a great time to work out”, as well as how customized it feels (for example, how she’ll put together just the right exercise regimen to satisfy your goals).

The Achilles Heel of this title, of course, is how inconsistently the camera tracks movements. Poor controller response is the cardinal sin of Wii games. It seems that Ubisoft came up with a great idea and put in a valiant attempt to make it happen, but the technology simply isn’t there yet. I suppose the first warning sign was that they signed up Jenny McCarthy to be the star of the game. From Jillian Michaels to Daisy Fuentes, it seems to be the kiss of death for a Wii game when a celebrity is asked to headline a video game. Who knows what this title could have been had they spent the money they’re paying the celebrity for development and testing. I’m not a software engineer, but I wonder if there was anything at all they could have done to improve things, from providing reflective arms straps or leg straps which could be better detected by the camera, to doing more meaningful calibration than they do today, to supplementing the video information alone with Balance Board, Nunchuk, or Wii remote information.

From what I can tell, doing certain things gave you the best chance for success, but they were far from foolproof:

• Stand in the middle of the screen. Make sure your on-screen image is about the same size as the animated Jenny’s image (stand 8-10 feet away).
• Make sure the background is plain, and that your clothes contrast against the background (e.g., wear all black if you’re exercising against a white wall and wear very bright clothes if you’re against a darker wall). Clear away everything from the camera’s view.
• Time your exercises to precisely match the animated Jenny’s on-screen movements. Your own video image will lag, so you need to match her movements. The music is completely useless (it’s just background music with a beat independent of the exercise).
• Make sure the lighting is such that your images isn’t too bright (e.g. next to a sunny window) or too dim (have a lot of ambient lighting)
• Make sure there’s nothing else in the image that’s moving.

To sum up? Ubisoft came up with a great idea here, but they just couldn’t get it working. You’ll get essentially the same exercises with the $19 My Fitness Coach, so you need to ask yourself if it’s worth an extra $50 for little more than a generic Webcam and a sometimes-brilliant, sometimes-frustrating experience.

To sum up? A great idea, and if everything worked, I’d be touting it as the new king of the hill. But at the end of the day the poor responsiveness makes it too frustrating to deal with. Exercise-wise, there’s nothing here you can’t get in the $19 My Fitness Coach. So the question you need to ask yourself is, is it worth an extra $50 for a low-end Webcam and the thrill of seeing your own image on-screen, knowing that the motion-detecting technology is frustrating and probably years away from being perfected.

While it’s designed for people who already own EA Sports Active (it doesn’t come included with a resistance band or a leg strap for the nunchuk), you actually don’t have to have the original game to play it. in other words, if you choose to purchase a resistance band and leg strap separately (you would need to get the EA Sports Active Multiplayer Pack), you can play the game on its own.

When you start the disc up for the first time, if the system detects that you have a profile from the original EA Sports Active, it’ll let you import it in just a few clicks. Something else that’s new in EA Sports Active: More Workouts is the use of trophies to motivate you. You even get a trophy for successfully importing your profile 🙂

One improvement is that you can now use the Wii Balance Board to check your weight. In this sense, they’ve caught up to games like Wii Fit and The Biggest Loser. Speaking of the Balance Board, it’s still optional for use in the actual exercises—you can certainly do most of the exercises without one. That said, if you do have one, they did an excellent job of incorporating it into the exercises, and it definitely enhances the experience.
You start out by recreating your profile. Once again, you can customize your on-screen character. You’re still limited to only a handful of body types, skin colors, and hair styles, but for some reason you now have 25 caps to choose from and 24 pairs of shoes.

Once again, you can choose a male or a female trainer, still the same somewhat creepy animated figures who shout out encouragement to you.

Once you get to the main menu it looks about the same with the same catchy music. The biggest difference is that instead of a 30-day challenge, you now have the option to take a 6 week challenge.

The new 6 week challenge is a vast improvement over the 30-day challenge of the original, more in lines of the type of training program you’d sign up for in a gym. For those who found the workouts in the original too easy, you’ll be pleased to know that you still have the option to choose intensity levels of easy, medium, or hard, and hard really is hard. The workouts are expertly designed to focus on different muscle groups more intensively throughout the workout, an improvement over the original where you’d work on one set of muscles and then alternate to another. One other major improvement is the ability to choose the days of the week to work out, rather than being forced into every other day. For me, I chose Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, mainly because I’m too busy during the week to take more than two weekdays.

Another improvement is the Journal. This is where you can keep a virtual diary of your diet and exercise. When you click on the journal, you’ll be able to take daily surveys which ask you questions such as “how many glasses of water did you consume yesterday” and “how many restaurant/fast food meals did you eat”. Like a personal trainer, the Wii will give you advice based on your answers. There’s also a place in the journal where you can enter other physical activity you did outside of EA Sports Active More Workouts, letting you choose from a wide range of activities from walking and running to dancing and yoga. By selecting “Other”, you can record workouts you did in other Wii games.

The reporting tools are also pretty impressive. You can look up a weekly fitness tracker that shows calories burned, a chart of your weight, and the number of workouts, total exercise time, and number of miles covered in your EA Sports Active workout.

EA Sports Active More Workouts has a huge array of new exercises. Something I found impressive is that while they didn’t reproduce the exercises from the original, they came up with 30 completely new exercises that work out every part of your body, from lower body to upper body. One other nice addition is a warm-up and cool-down period, instead of rushing straight into the more intense exercises. Something else that impressed me was that they thought of new and creative ways to use the resistance band. For example, to do one-arm rows, you’re instructed to fold the band in half and step on the band in a way that you really do get great resistance on your biceps.

The highlight of the title has to be the new fitness activities. As with its predecessor, EA Sports Active More Workouts has some great fitness activities: water skiing, paddle surfing, cardio boxing, step aerobics, squash, and an obstacle course.

As with the fitness activities of the original, the fitness activities are so much accurate simulations of the sports activities as they are clever ways to get you to mimic exercise movements (like squatting and lunges) in repetition without realizing you are. It’s tedious to go through dozens of reps of squats and arm movements; on the other hand, it’s a blast to be doing it playing a fast-paced game of virtual squash.

The controls are spot-on. Unlike games like The Biggest Loser and Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2010, which passively “check” to see if you’re making the right movements once you’ve made them (and often give you false positives and false negatives—if I hear Jillian Michaels one more time yelling at me unjustly I’m going to scream). EA Sports Active More Workouts actually responds to your exact movements as they’re making them. And if you mess up, it doesn’t yell at you.

The game, of course, takes place on an island which seems to be a trend. After visiting Wuhu Island in Wii Fit, Jillian’s Island in Jillian Michaels Fitness Ultimatum 2010, and the virtual Biggest Loser Resort, I feel like I’ve worked out all over the Carribbean. But I admit, there’s something soothing about escaping for 20 minutes a day with the sound of the surf pounding on the shores.

All in all, I was impressed with EA Sports Active: More Workouts, so much so that it will once again regain position #1 in the list of Best Wii Exercise Games. While it may not be as “fun” as Wii Fit Plus, and the graphics aren’t as good, the workout regimen itself is a tough one which really gets you working out, and the fitness activities are a good balance of fun plus an effective workout. It’s not a game you can play with the family (although there is an option to exercise with someone else, side by side), but on the other hand it does the best job of any Wii Exercise Game to balance fun and fitness.

So, it was only a matter of time before a Biggest Loser Video Game for the Wii came out. Now, I admit I was a bit skeptical at this one. Typically when game publishers buy rights to great brand names and trademarks, the games they create are anything but great. From Daisy Fuentes Pilates to Jillian Michael’s own Fitness Ultimatum 2009, game publishers often get lazy knowing that the brand name will guarantee them a certain number of sales regardless of the quality of their game. And so they get sloppy with the game design or the quality assurance.

I’m happy to say that The Biggest Loser bucks this trend. It’s a very solid fitness title for the Wii. I don’t use the word “game” because it’s not exactly fun like a game. It’s more like an interactive fitness video. In fact, it reminds me most of Ubisoft’s My Fitness Coach in that way, but they’ve come a long way since My Fitness Coach (so much so that The Biggest Loser has officially bumped My Fitness Coach out of our Top 10 list of best Wii Fitness games).

The core of The Biggest Loser is its very comprehensive list of dozens and dozens of Single Exercises, which are essentially calisthenic exercises (i.e. exercises that don’t use weights or equipment). They really hit a home run with these. Every calisthenic exercise you can think of is included, including exercises for a cardio workout; for working out the upper body, core, and lower body; and even yoga poses. Each exercise ranges from light, moderate, challenging, hard, and intense. Each one is identified by an icon (color-coded by intensity). As you select each icon in the menu, there’s even a figure telling you exactly what muscle groups you’re working out.

When you start each exercise, an on-screen figure will show you very clearly how to do the exercise, including the correct posture, moves, and timing. You basically follow along. The exercises typically use the Wii-mote and/or the Balance Board passively to “check” your progress. For example, when you choose the jump rope exercise, you hold the Wii-mote like the handle of a jump rope and make small circles with it. When you choose “tire drills”, you put the Wii-mote in your pocket and run in place, simulating the kinds of drills that football players do when they run through tires. Similarly, “fast skaters” is an exercise where you simulate a speed skater waving his or her arms. There are a number of exercises which use the balance board such as the “plank” (where you press both hands against the balance board), a “T-Raise” (where one hand is on the balance board and the other is stretched out). Some exercises will be very familiar (jumping jacks, push ups), but even the ones that aren’t familiar are very intuitive once you watch the on-screen character doing them.

I should note that for the most part, you’re on the “honor system” as to how closely you follow the on-screen examples. Even if you get a little sloppy in your form or don’t do the exercise properly, more often than not it’ll still register and Bob or Jillian will continue to shout out praise and encouragement. That said, when you do it exactly right, you’ll usually see confirmation on-screen.

You can do each of the exercises a la carte, but more likely you’ll want to choose Exercise Routines, which combine multiple single exercises into comprehensive pre-designed programs to work out your full body, upper body, core, lower body or do yoga exercises. You can also create a custom routine, made up of your favorite single exercises. As with single exercises, you can choose anything from light to intense exercise.

And of course, you can choose the full Fitness Program. You enter your name, sex, birthday, height and weight (conveniently, you can use your Balance Board to measure your weight, both your initial weight and in your very own “weigh ins”). Then, you pick your favorite real-life Biggest Loser contestant to play as, whether it be Matt Hoover from Season 2, Ali Vincent from Season 5, Michelle Aguilar from Season 6, or from a list of five others. You can customize the color of the T-Shirt your character wears, and then you pick whether you want to hear Bob Harper or Jillian Michaels as “your trainer”.  From there, you can pick a personal goal: whether you want to simply maintain your current weight and improve your health, lose a little weight, or lose a lot of weight. You’ll also pick a skill level and a program length. Based on all the things you enter, the system will calculate a specific exercise regiment for you, complete with dates. If you’re really committed, you can also input the number of calories you eat every day, as well as log any additional training you do outside of the program (such as walking, running or biking outside), and the program will adjust itself accordingly.

Unfortunately, as time went on, millions of Balance Boards went into the closet. Wii Fit was an innovative title, but once the novelty wore off, a lot of people simply found it wasn’t very useful for continuous exercise. The Yoga and Strength training exercises were good, but you could only perform them one at a time. The Balance Games were fun but with a few exceptions like Hula Hoop, they didn’t really do much as far as aerobic exercise. The need to calibrate the balance board each time you played or switched players was a major annoyance. Your progress was based on time spent, not calories burned.

The best thing to happen to the Wii Fit was a little something called EA Sports Active. It was released by Electronic Arts a few months ago, and they raised the bar for what a fitness title should be. The influence of EA Sports Active on Nintendo’s Wii Fit Plus is very clear, and the Nintendo folks did a great job of improving Wii Fit. The result was Wii Fit Plus.

The first thing to note is that Wii Fit Plus is not a “sequel” to the original Wii Fit, but rather it contains all the content of the original Wii Fit and adds a number of improvements. In other words, if you don’t have Wii Fit already, you can skip it, buy Wii Fit Plus with the Balance Board. If you already have Wii Fit, you can buy the Wii Fit Plus game only.

For those with the old Wii Fit, the conversion of your old profile data to the new is quick and seamless. It just takes a couple seconds and voila, all of your old weight data and workout data is available in Wii Fit Plus.

The first improvement, clearly influenced by EA Sports Active, is that instead of choosing individual strength and yoga exercises ad-hoc, you can choose from a number of pre-configured workout routines. There’s a new button called “My Wii Fit Plus”. When you click on it, you’re taken to a virtual locker room. Your animated balance board (as chipper and encouraging as ever) walks you through the process of choosing a workout routine based on any number of specific goals, ranging from better health to improving specific parts of your body. In all honesty, there may be a few too many options for my taste (I like the simplicity of EA Sports in this regard), but if you’re committed to a specific workout and exercise goal, chances are you’ll find what you need here.

The activities are still broken out by category: Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, and Balance Games. All of these are identical to the old Wii Fit, except that there there are a 6 new Yoga and Strength training exercises which add some more variety and challenge to those categories.

But here’s the part of the review I’m sure you’ve been waiting for. The biggest improvement in Wii Fit Plus is the addition of 15 “Training Plus” activities.

Perfect 10 (Workout intensity: 2 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): A game that tests your math skills as much as your flexibility. Numbers will appear on giant mushroom, and you bump your hips to hit the numbers that add (or subtract) to 10 or 15 or 20. You won’t be losing huge amounts of weight from this one, but it’s a great way to test your mind and body coordination and this is one you’ll play over and over again to try to beat your last time or the best score of a family member. 2.5 METs.

Island Cycling (Workout intensity: 4 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): This is a game that uses the Balance Board (you step on the board with your left and right foot to simulate bicycle pedalling) and the Wiimote (which you use to steer). The game itself looks a lot like the cycling game on Wii Sports Resort. Unlike that game, this game isn’t timed; rather, you need to cycle around a large island collecting flags. The island is beautifully designed with amazing details, from the sound of distant trains as you go over a tall bridge, to the sound of windmills in the breeze, to an amazingly intricate layout of caves, ramps, cliffs, and bridges, to the need to “pedal” harder as you’re going up hills. This is definitely one you can spend a lot of time on and not even realize you were exercising. 2.5 METs.

Rhythm Kung-Fu (Workout intensity: 3 of 5, Fun 5 of 5): This is the first game that put a huge smile on my face. Using your Wiimote, the Nunchuk, and the Balance Board, you have to strike different “kung fu” poses in rhythm to delightfully cheesy kung-fu movie music. It’s essentially a game of “Simon Says”, where you mimic the moves of a groups of Miis standing behind you (and if you have family or friend Miis on your system, you’ll see some familiar faces). Another game that perhaps doesn’t provide the most strenuous workout at first, but one you’ll be playing over and over again to try to beat your high score (you’re judged based on your timing). 3.0 METs.

Driving Range (Workout intensity: 1 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): Sure, golf has been done in Wii Sports, in Wii Sports Resort, and in games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour. Wii Fit Plus brings something a little different to the table, though. You position the Balance Board vertically, and swing your Wii-mote like a golf club. There’s a “swing analyzer” which is surprisingly good not just for casual video game golfers but also for real golfers to analyze their form. It measures the straightness of your swing, your weight distribution, and gives a pretty good indication of how far your drive will go. With these new improvements and the improvements of the Wii MotionPlus (which surprisingly isn’t taken advantage of in Wii Fit Plus), I think it’s safe to say that the Wii is very close to being a real-life golf simulator. 3.0 METs.

Segway Circuit (Workout intensity: 3 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): In a clever co-branding deal, Nintendo teamed up with the folks at Segway for this game. In it, you ride a Segway around the island trying to pop balloons that are being put up around the island by pesky moles. Like a real Segway, you lean forward to move forward and you lean back to go back, steering with the Wii-mote. An especially fun, if infuriating part is when you need to chase down the last mole all over the island to pop the last balloon. 2.0 METs.

Bird’s-Eye Bull’s-Eye, a.k.a. Flying Chicken (Workout intensity: 5 of 5, Fun 5 of 5): This is the one you probably heard about, and it (along with Obstacle Course) is the winner. Your Mii dons a chicken outfit and has to fly from target to target. How do you fly? By flapping your arms. Seriously. You can either flap your arms with your hands extended, or do a “chicken dance” type movement by bending your elbows. Either way, the Balance Board will amazingly detect how strongly, quickly, or slowly you’re flapping. Like a real bird, you flap faster to get better control, and you flap slower to soar great distances. You control where you’re moving by leaning on the Balance Board. It is, I kid you not, the closest you will ever come to flying like a bird. It’s a great upper body workout that you’ll do again and again. 2.5 METs.

Snowball Fight (Workout intensity: 2 of 5, Fun 5 of 5): This one is just plain fun. You use the Wii-mote to shoot snowballs at an invading army of Miis (again, if you have custom Miis stored on your system you’ll see some familiar faces), and duck left and right to hide behind a barricade to avoid getting hit yourself with snowballs. All of the fun of a real snowball fight, none of the frostbite. 2.0 METs.

Obstacle Course (Workout intensity: 5 of 5, Fun 5 of 5): This is the game I was most looking forward too, and I was not disappointed. The way it’s been described is that it’s like Mario Bros, only you are playing the part of Mario running through a 3-D obstacle course. You run in place on the Balance Board to make your character move forward and you straighten your knees to make him jump. In the process, you’ll be navigating around huge swinging wrecking balls, moving sidewalks, and falling logs. 3.0 METs.

Tilt City (Workout intensity: 1 of 5, Fun 3 of 5): I admit, I’m not so crazy about these “tilt” games, maybe because I’m just not very coordinated. This is a game where you need to tilt the Wii-mote and shift your weight on the balance board in a coordinated fashion to steer colored balls into the right container. It’s not really an exercise game, but one more to test your reflexes and coordination. 2.0 METs.

Rhythm Parade (Workout intensity: 4 of 5, Fun 5 of 5): This was another one to put a huge smile on my face. You’re basically a drum major, marching in place to the sound of a beat. Like rhythm games like Helix and Samba Di Amigo, you move your Wii-mote and Nunchuk to match on-screen cues. The better you match, the bigger your marching band becomes (and again, you’ll see familiar faces join in the band if you have custom Miis). Like other Wii rhythm games of this ilk, I’m not sure how accurate the Wii and Nunchuk are (there are times I’m sure I move it on time but it doesn’t register on the screen), but the game is pretty forgiving. 3.0 METs.

Big Top Juggling (Workout intensity: 3 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): No, this one won’t really teach you how to juggle, but once you’re done you’ll have the same satisfaction as if you did know how. It’s a game where you have to stay balanced on a giant ball (using your feet on the Balance Board), while at the same time keeping 1, 2, or 3 balls in the the air by flicking your Wii-mote and Nunchuk. Like with the Hula Hoop game, Miis to the side will throw balls in your direction, and if you’ve got three going at one time, they’ll throw bombs to distract you. 2.0 METs.

Skateboard Arena (Workout intensity: 4 of 5, Fun 4 of 5): I am not a skater-boy, but still, this is a pretty fair representation of riding a skateboard. You position the Balance Board vertically and stand on it like a skateboard. You can build speed by pushing off your back foot (I find it helps to pull up on my front foot just a bit and push down to move). You steer by moving your body back and forth, and you can jump by straightening your knees. You go through a series of exercises just like a real skateboarder, from jumping on ramps to riding on rails to doing tricks on half-pipes. 3.0 METs.

Table Tilt Plus (Workout intensity: 1 of 5, Fun 3 of 5): This one is a lot like those labyrinth games where you’re trying to steer a ball around holes (in this case, you’re trying to get balls into holes). Again, not a big fan of the games where you tilt your body to control the playing field, but I suppose for someone a lot younger, thinner, and more coordinated than me these kinds of things are loads of fun :P. 1.5 METs.

Balance Bubble Plus (Workout intensity: 1 of 5, Fun 2 of 5): Same sentiments as I wrote above. This is an improved version of the old Wii Fit Balance game where you’re floating in a bubble trying to navigate your way through a maze. As your bubble gets close to edges, you start to fidget and your bubble pops if you don’t fix it right away. And don’t get me started about the killer bees you meet at the end of the maze. As for me, I typically end up falling over on my face with these games :). 2.0 METs.

Basic Run Plus (Workout intensity: 5 of 5, Fun 3 of 5): This is a variation of the jogging game in the Aerobic games section of Wii Fit Plus. Like that game, you control this one by running in place on the Balance Board, and you’re treated to a lot of great scenery and new paths to explore on Wii Fit Island. An added feature is that at the end of the game, you’ll be quizzed on things you saw, which is added to your final score. This little improvement surprisingly makes the run a lot more interesting, as you make sure to carefully observe every little detail as you’re running. 4.0 METs.

Other improvements:

1) The use of METs and report of calories burned. What does METs stand for? METs (which stands for Metabolic EquivalenTs) is a standard way to measure energy expenditure. One annoyance with the old Wii Fit was that whether you did an exercise that used no energy like a stretching exercise or one that expended vast amounts of energy like Super Hula Hoop, your progress was marked by the time spent or “Fit Credits” that didn’t mean anything in the real world. With Wii Fit Plus, METs are used in conjunction with your body weight and the time spent to calculate the number of calories burned. There’s even a neat little function in My Wii Fit Plus where you can see the number of calories you’ve burned in terms of food (you can even choose the type and amount of food you want to burn off and set it as a goal).

2) Balance Board improvements. With the old Wii Fit, each time you started a new routine, you’d need to wait for the Balance Board to calibrate. I suppose this was intended in the case where multiple people would be sharing the Balance Board, but it got annoying very fast. Wii Fit Plus is a bit more intelligent, in that it’ll sense whether the weight has changed and give the option to recalibrate only if it has. I’ve experienced a number of “false positives” in which it thought my weight changed when it didn’t, but that’s just a minor annoyance compared to the old way. I was actually a bit puzzled as to why the Wii MotionPlus wasn’t used in this game, but with the improvements to the Balance Board they really weren’t necessary.

3) The ability to measure a child or pet. This is a gimmick, of course, but a totally fun one if you have the aforementioned child or pet to measure. 🙂

Overall, Wii Fit Plus is a winner. To Nintendo’s credit, they weren’t content just to rest on their laurels, but they came up with improvements that truly breathed new life into the Wii Fit. As for the title of Best Wii Fitness game, I would say at this point it’s a virtual dead heat between EA Sports Active and Wii Fit Plus. EA Sports Active is still the better game for a traditional workout with a good combination of strength training and cardio exercise. But Wii Fit Plus wins hands-down for responsive and beautiful graphics and pure fun, which at the end of the day can be just as important (if it’s fun, you’ll play it again and again). I’m looking forward to seeing how EA Sports ups the ante.