Wii Fitness Game Reviews 3

Review of Fit in Six for Wii

On May 23, 2011 2:06 pm, by steve
Fit In Six by
Platform: Wii
Rated:E
2 of 5 stars – “Comprehensive set of exercises, but otherwise not a stellar offering from Ubisoft mainly due to lack of motion tracking.”
by ,
Written on May 23, 2011

Ubisoft has had an interesting history with exercise video games.

The first exercise game they released, My Fitness Coach, was a true pioneer in exergaming. Many of its features, while considered rudimentary today, were ground breaking things that had never been done before. It was a best-seller, for good reason. In many ways it set the foundation for the introduction of Wii Fit and the huge interest in exergaming to follow.

After this, Ubisoft came out with a long list of duds. My Fitness Coach 2 was a decent title, but horribly marketed. Your Shape with Jenny McCarthy was a disaster (Ubisoft somewhat redeemed itself by developing Your Shape: Fitness Evolved for the Xbox Kinect, which more or less realizes the dream begun with the original Your Shape). Ironically, Ubisoft’s greatest success in exergaming was not an exercise game at all. It was Just Dance, which got people shaking their booties and doing the mashed potato all over the country.

Fit in Six is Ubisoft’s newest entry into the “pure exercise gaming” world.

You start out the game by inputting your name, height, weight, and sex. There doesn’t seem to be an option for a balance board to measure your weight. One thing I found very, very annoying was that in order to input my age and weight I had to click…and click…and click…and click the arrow buttons (the default age is 25 and the default weight is 132, let’s just say I’m not close to either of those). Not a happy start.

The next screen says “Find Your Balance” and then shows a green bar, a blue bar, a lot of numbers, and five colored icons on the bottom of the screen. What I found ridiculous about this is that there is no kind of explanation or even a help screen about what this means. The icons and colors are hardly intuitive. It would have helped if they’d simply put a hover-over to explain what this all means and how I’d be using this in the game. Again, not a promising start.

On the next screen, I can choose my goal. They are:

  • Healthy Back (8 mins)
  • Better Foot Stability (7 mins)
  • Core Centering (7 mins)
  • Core Conditioning (5 mins)
  • Flat Belly (5 mins)
  • Easy Lifting (9 mins)
  • As Quick as a Flash (9 mins)
  • Pure Power Kicking (9 mins)
  • Rocking Abs (8 mins)
  • Slim Waist (8 mins)
  • Stretch Your Back (9 mins)
  • Superset Workout (9 mins)
You start the workout, and it basically consists of a string of standard exercise routines (such as stretches, crunches, and so on).
The on-screen trainer is a drawn figure that’s more cartoony than photorealistic, something I’ve grown used to with the Wii’s limited graphics. The trainer shows you the move to do on-screen. While the animation of the trainer is pretty accurate in demonstrating the technique to you, bottom line, it takes a lot of time to figure out how to do the “mirror” version. I would have liked to see the ability to examine and rotate the character’s motions more carefully (which existed even on last-generation Jillian Michaels games).
Interestingly, Ubisoft does let you hook up a USB Webcam (such as the one that came with Your Shape) to the Wii. But all this does is show a video of yourself in the corner of the screen. I didn’t find this useful in the least, in fact I found it distracting (if they wanted to make it more useful, they would have at least made it a split screen and made your video image the exact same size as the on-screen trainer’s).  There is no attempt at doing any kind of motion tracking with the camera, probably a good decision after horrific attempts to do so with games like Your Shape and Racquet Sports.
Not only is there no motion tracking with the camera, the game doesn’t even attempt to use the Wii controls at all to check accuracy or progress. This makes it just like an exercise video. To be honest, I’m torn as to whether this was a good idea. On the one hand, it’s nice not to have to deal with the kinds of inaccuracies from Ubisoft’s previous exercise games (which were fraught with false positives and the on-screen trainer shouting platitudes to you even when you don’t do the exercise right). It seems like they’ve given up trying to figure out motion controls, which is a shame.
As with all video games, it’s tough to do exercises on the floor and watch the screen at the same time. To some extent, you need to do the exercises over and over until you memorize them. The voice prompts of the on-screen trainer are pretty good, telling you when to move, when to breathe, when to relax, and what parts should be moving.
At the end of each workout, you can rate them. There’s no online integration or anything–rating an exercise just lets you keep track of which exercises you like.
One thing that Fit In Six does very comprehensively is offer “Classes”. Again, these are basically basic exercise routines strung together to form a “fitness class” the kind you might find in a gym. Here’s a list of all the classes you can choose from:
Upper Body
  • Sculpted Back (20 mins)
  • Flexible Upper Back (13 mins)
  • Open Chest (15 mins)
  • Sexy Shoulders (9 mins)
  • Sexy Shoulders Pro (14 mins)
  • Strong Triceps (9 mins)
  • Strong Triceps Pro (12 mins)
Core Body
  • Healthy Back (8 mins)
  • Healthy Back Pro (22 mins)
  • Flat Belly (5 mins)
  • Six Pack Starter (10 mins)
  • Six Pack Pro (19 mins)
  • Slim Waist (8 mins)
  • Slim Waist Pro (13 mins)
  • Strong Back (10 mins)
  • Strong Back Pro (21 mins)
Lower Body
  • Beach Workout (21 mins)
  • Beach Workout Pro (26 mins)
  • Shapely Hips (17 mins)
  • Head to Toe Sculpting (30 mins)
  • Glutes Lifting (12 mins)
  • No Muscle Untouched (29 mins)
  • Toned Waist (15 mins)
  • Tight Tush (6 mins)
  • Tight Tush Pro (15 mins)
Fit For Life
  • Baby Carriage (13 mins)
  • Better Foot Stability (7 mins)
  • Carry Heavy Tote Bags (11 mins)
  • Climb Stairs Like a Teen (10 mins)
  • Easy Sit Up and Down (13 mins)
  • Easy Lifting (9 mins)
  • As Quick as a Flash (9 mins)
  • Standing Office Workout (13 mins)
  • Stiletto Workout (10 mins)
Cardio
  • Cardio Warm-up 1 (3 mins)
  • Cardio Warm up 2 (4 mins)
  • Cardio Warm up 3 (5 mins)
  • Fat Burning (11 mins)
  • Fat Burning Pro (20 mins)
  • Fit for Soccer (5 mins)
  • Fit for Soccer Pro (15 mins)
  • Marathon Master (7 mins)
  • Marathon Master Pro (13 mins)

Boot Camp
  • Boot Camp Warm Up 1 (4 mins)
  • Boot Camp Warm Up 2 (4 mins)
  • Boot Camp Warm up 3 (3 mins)
  • Core Conditioning (5 mins)
  • Core Conditioning Pro (12 mins)
  • Intense Arm Workout (12 mins)
  • Power Pushup (11 mins)
  • Powerful Torso Pro (12 mins)
  • Rocking Abs (8 mins)
Kick Boxing
  • Action Circuit (12 mins)
  • Fight and Defend (9 mins)
  • Burning Rist (10 mins)
  • Kickboxing Basics (9 mins)
  • Kickboxing Warm Up 1 (3 mins)
  • Kickboxing Warm Up 2 (5 mins)
  • Kickboxing Warm up 3 (6 mins)
  • Pure Power Kicking (9 mins)
  • Pure Power Punching (9 mins)
Cardio Dance
  • Challenge Your Heart Rate (14 mins)
  • Cardio Dance Basics (11 mins)
  • Energy Empowerment (18 mins)
  • Energy Burner (15 mins)
  • Cardio Dance Challenge (16 mins)
  • Cardio Dance Warm Up 1 (2 mins)
  • Cardio Dance Warm Up 2 (3 mins)
  • Cardio Dance Warm Up 3 (3 mins)
  • Lust for Life (12 mins)
  • Willpower Activator (14 mins)
Pilates
  • Balanced Body (26 mins)
  • Core Centering (7 mins)
  • Energy Flow (12 mins)
  • Improved Flexibility (10 mins)
  • Pilates Complete (35 mins)
  • Pilates Power (25 mins)
  • Strong Core Pro (19 mins)
  • Stretch Your Back (9 mins)
Latin Dance
  • Back to Holiday (12 mins)
  • Caribbean Device (9 mins)
  • Hot Summer (16 mins)
  • Latin Dance Party (20 mins)
  • Latin Dance Warm Up 1 (3 mins)
  • Latin Dance Warm Up 2 (3 mins)
  • Latin Dance Warm Up 3 (5 mins)
  • Latin Love (13 mins)
  • Mambo Night (12 mins)
  • Rhythm ‘N’ Dance (10 mins)

Dance Moves
  • Session 1: Skate (7 mins)
  • Session 2: Stop (5 mins)
  • Session 3: Side ‘N’ Cross Jump (6 mins)
  • Session 4: Two-Step (6 mins)
  • Session 5: Cross Walk (5 mins)
  • Session 6: Set Up ‘N’ Wiper (7 mins)
  • Session 7: Skate ‘N’ Stomp (8 mins)
  • Session 8: Jumping Steps (7 mins)
  • Session 9: Flying Steps (7 mins)
  • Session 10: Compilation (13 mins)

There’s also a section called “Challenges”, which lets you choose from balance, cardio, core body, flexibility, lower body, upper body (it took me a while to realize that these are the “In Six” referred to in the game’s title).
Again, without motion tracking, the Challenges were a bit weak. The game presents a challenge to you, and it’s up to you to do it and to tell the system whether you did it or not. So you’re basically on the “honor system”.

Overall Fit In Six has an impressive, almost staggering number of workout routines. They’re demonstrated pretty effectively by the on-screen trainer. If you’re just looking for a glorified exercise video that has a comprehensive set of workouts for you to try, this is not a bad choice for you.
The problem is that Fit In Six adds absolutely nothing new to the world of Wii exercise games. In fact, it seems to borrow liberally from other games. The Latin dance exercises seems a lot like Zumba Fitness. The fact that individual exercises that can be put together are around 7-13 minutes seems to borrow from 10 Minute Solutions. Even the dance routines seem reminiscent of Ubisoft’s own Gold’s Gym Dance Workout.
The worst thing Ubisoft did, of course, is remove motion tracking altogether from a Wii game. Companies like EA Sports have successfully proven that effective motion tracking can be done, but Ubisoft almost seems to have given up. I do believe that there will be more Wii games that push the platform forward in fitness gaming. This is not one of them.
Rating: 2 of 5 stars.

3 Comments

  • Reply
    Jen
    Jul 01, 2011 12:39 pm

    I disagree with the rating given to the Fit in 6 game by this site. I actually prefer not to have motion tracking sometimes; if you have to scratch your nose, or adjust yourself while working out, many games will tell you to stay focused or watch the tutorial again. Motion tracking is not a totally bad thing, but I like to alternate between my motion tracking and non motion tracking games. My favorite game, almost 3 years into buying/using Wii fitness games diligently, is My Fitness Coach. I am pretty motivated myself, though. Fit in 6 looks like it has tons of mix and match workouts to choose from, which is very appealing to me — I’m going to try it!

    I don’t think a low rating should be given based almost solely on a lack of motion tracking. Sometimes oldschool can be better for certain people!

  • Reply
    steve
    Jul 02, 2011 10:07 am

    Thanks for your comment, Jen. I respect your opinion, and in fact if you look way back in the archives, you’ll see that I gave My Fitness Coach a 5 stars out of 5 back in the day. This is because at the time it was truly innovative–to be able to do things like change backgrounds and change music was something new that exercise videos and DVDs couldn’t do before then.

    However, in 2011 I do think the bar has been set much higher. There are excellent games such as EA Sports Active and Just Dance which prove that motion control can be done pretty well. The way I see it, Ubisoft developed a decent enough game in terms of the breadth of exercises, but either didn’t have either the time or programming talent to get the motion controls working right. Worse, it threw in gimmicks like the video camera which don’t add anything at all. From my perspective, that doesn’t bring anything else to the table that buying a set of DVDs (where you can see a real person, not just a cartoony figure).

    As you said, this kind of game does have its audience. They will sell a fair amount of copies. And five years ago, I probably would have given it a stellar review. But as I said in the review, I don’t see anything here that pushes the genre forward. And at a time when Microsoft’s Kinect and Sony’s Move are pushing the envelope, the Wii needs developers to push the envelope forward to avoid being left behind.

    Thanks again!

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