8:35am Friday 8th January 2010
By David Barnett
This Christmas, we were the lucky recipients of one of those Nintendo Wii balance board affairs, which is a bit like a big plastic tray you stand on to play games.
Or rather not games, but serious exercise programmes, as per the one that came with the gizmo.
It really is a rather remarkable piece of kit. For those unfamiliar with the Wii (stupid name, obviously not invented by anyone from Britain, because they would have realised it has small children in fits of laughter every time they say it) you basically plug it into your telly and wave a remote control at it to move things around or shoot aliens.
The balance board takes this remote technology on a step, and by distributing your weight on the board you can make stuff happen on the screen.
The Wii Fit programme starts off by doing a body test on you, and shortly after you stand on the board at the screen’s instruction you realise you have been duped – not only is the board a games controller, but it is also a cunningly-disguised set of scales, and everyone knows that you don’t set foot on a set of scales until at least a month after Christmas.
After inputting your weight and vital statistics, the Wii then tells you what kind of physical shape you’re in. The cheeky thing only went and marked me down as “overweight”.
Not only that, but it also criticised my taste in music, didn’t have a good word to say about my clothes, and started making eyes at my wife, who it had, of course, recorded as having a “healthy” weight.
The final straw came regarding my Mii. A Mii is a little on-screen avatar of yourself which you create and which is stored in the Wii and can be used to put yourself into games and activities.
Was it my imagination, or had the Wii actually made my Mii look a little tubby around the middle after taking my weight? No, it wasn’t my imagination. I am now overweight on a video game as well as in real life, apparently.
The idea of the Wii Fit is to, of course, get you fit, and it does have an excellent range of programmes that you can do in the comfort and privacy of your own home, with the curtains drawn – hula hoop, jogging on the spot, even yoga stuff.
It does, however, come with some rather arch comments, that I always imagine would be in the voice of Kenneth Williams if the thing was actually speaking them: “Oh, you haven’t logged in for a couple of days”, or, “Been hitting the snacks just before bedtime, have we?”
I am determined to reduce the waistline of my Mii, however, and will stick with it. Besides, the balance board does have one major advantage over joysticks and hand-held controllers – it means you can play the Wii with a pint in one hand and a pie in the other.
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