Wii Fit Plus—A New & Improved Opportunity to Look Idiotic, and Have it Confirmed by a Mildly Snarky Balance Board and Hurtful Scoring.
I’ll start with the fact that there is a balance game included that is based solely on flapping your arms to get from bulls eye to bulls eye. So not only do you have to flap your arms—wings—and lean from side to side, but you are provided with the sparkling opportunity to see that not only is it possible to fall off of a Wii Balance Board, but that it might actually strain your muscles. For me anyway. I have pipe-cleaner arms. This is not to say that they are attractively skinny, just that they can support just about as much weight as a pipe-cleaner.
Worse than all of this is the fact that a whispered “dammit!” involuntarily emitted from my gritted teeth when I didn’t land where I wanted to. I realized it was time to try another balance game within WF+.
Yes, my ‘work-out’ is more about things like simulated snowball fights and less about ‘real exercise’ and ‘running.’
Onto the snowball fighting. This is the one where you get to stand in the shivering cold snowy environment so perfect for snowball fighting, without ever having to leave your room/apartment/dorm/house. Video games are providing me with the ski-lodge vs. slopes equivalent of exercise.
With this snowball fighting, I get to stand in pretend-shivery-cold and basically get bullied. Not by kids or, yes, real people, but by Miis that vary in age from fat little Chinese kids in sunglasses to old, bearded white men that look like that fisherman guy. All of these pretend-people have ganged up on me, and left me to repeatedly lose consciousness from icy snowball hits to the middle of my face. This exercise, which awards me the loss of three calories or something, according to the aptly chosen piggy bank, allows me to feel insulted and even a little shamefully irritated by all of these people, young and old, who won’t stop trying to hurl sharp cold balls at my face.
Best of all with these is that when you are abominable at the games, as I have been, it plays this dopey music that only emphasizes your imperfection in the Wii World. As your Mii drops to his or her knees in broken self-loathing and shakes their white-knuckled fists at the heavens, you get to listen to the type of music that usually indicates that Goofy is about to tumble down the ski slopes.
When it rates you with one star—something that you get the feeling is sort of a grudging participation ribbon—it gives you a low-level adjective in keeping with the theme of the game. For example, this game called “Perfect Ten” or something unassuming like that. You have to do this little hip-bumping thing where you swivel your hips unattractively into the mushrooms on the screen in order to add the numbers on top of the ‘shrooms to equal ten. This taught me one thing: I’m still bad at math. Especially when negatives become involved. When I got a 1 star on this one, after a descending of dopey musical notes (the kind that simultaneously joins with a camera zooming in on a character who shrugs and makes that Debbie Downer face), it announced that I was ‘Abacus’ at this game. Fantastic.
On this tilty-table thing, I got a one-star and was told I was, “Unbalanced.” I realize it is a balance game. But I think that’s still a little harsh.
When you get two stars, it’s almost worse. You jump up in the air to victorious music, practically a look of rapture on your little Mii face. This is worse than dropping to your knees, a broken Mii, because…biicause…the fact that being just only marginally better gets such a heroic fanfare seems only insulting. It’s like the Sympathetic Smile Score.
I’ll (possibly) get back to you on what happens when I know what happens for three and four stars.
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