Doing a proper review seems a bit pointless since the new version is out. Let’s just say that the general consensus: Wii Fit is good for exergaming, Activelife is good for exercising, seems about on the money. Comparing calorie counts with Wii Fit plus, the 30 day challenge seems to burn about 50%-100% more calories, minute per minute, than a reasonably strenuous mix of wii fit activities. Active Life Routines also help you get those 30 minutes done with less interruptions.
I actually do miss a lot of the cute features in Wii Fit: neat island backdrop, seeing friend’s Miis, and some of the games. Active Life is a bit more tethered to reality in ways that I don’t think are necessary to be an effective exercise program but may be better suited to the target audience.
I’m currently working my way through the 30 day challenge. It’s a great feature, it handles your routine picking for you and lets you pick a difficulty. Hard is rather hard, I’ve kept with it for now but may need to drop to medium before the end. One annoyance though, if you end after midnight, the whole thing counts as the next day. Since you only get a new 30 day challenge the day after completing the previous one, this rather breaks up the schedule a bit.
One other slight note of annoyance: the directing on the videos is bad. They do a good job showing the exercises, but it’s not necessary to smile constantly while doing so. That creeps me out a little. Also I’m terrible at inline skating but slowly figuring out the tricks.
One bit of tech synergy that might work well with exercise gaming: picture in a picture television. Active life uses the picture in a picture concept, but I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be combine with watching another show entirely rather than watching an avatar duplicate the exercise. Unlike wii fit, you don’t really have single exercise 30 minutes options, probably for the best, so dual-gaming is likely out, but I wouldn’t mind working through my DVD backlog.
I'm enjoying the novelty of Wii Fit Plus myself. It feels much more fluid than its predecessor; I can work out without having to push A quite so often, but it is frustrating now that the calorie count is visible to work out realllly hard for 30 minutes and discover I've only burned 200 calories.
Posted by: Laura | November 18, 2009 at 05:10 AM
I've followed your reviews of this previously, and I have to say, just using Wii Fit, I've lost a bunch of weight and gotten significantly more toned. I don't know... I will allow that other games may be better, and such, and that I also get at least an hour or so of aerobic exercise every day on top of Wii Fit time, but I think you can get a solid workout from it without too much problems. Maybe I should try the other one anyway, though.
Posted by: Moti | November 18, 2009 at 10:17 AM
Fair enough. I have a tougher time judging as I'm at a bit of an equilibrium weight. What active life does for me is push me towards good exercise without requiring multiple acts of will power. Also, ojne big issue for me is that I've got a 2:30+ daily commute so I need exercise efficiency.
That said, I had a lot of fun with wii fit, active life is new and fresh but may have less staying power. Time will tell.
Regardless, on the whole I think wii fit is capable of meeting your exercise needs, but active life guides you in that pursuit
Posted by: Greg Sanders | November 18, 2009 at 08:09 PM