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PREVIEW
Wii Fit Plus - The Plus is for Chicken Suit

Nintendo’s got a great holiday line-up of games this year. One such game is Wii Fit Plus, the follow-up to the extremely successful Wii Fit. So what’s the Plus all about? It seems to be in indication that there’s a lot more to this title than its predecessor, and from the short time I spent with a preview build, I’d have to say the Plus is for Chicken Suit.

The game includes the workout routines from Wii Fit but will feature a more streamlined user interface so that navigating between different activities and between different players (and exercisers) isn’t such a tedious process. But in addition to this, there seems to be a lot more in the extras department. Unlike Wii Fit, it looks like Wii Fit Plus will have a lot more in terms of games. This time around there are 15 new balance games and six new strength training and yoga exercises.

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time playing around with the various games in the non-workout part of the disc, but I was nevertheless worked out. In fact, days after the preview I began to wonder why my calves were feeling the burn so much when I’d climb stairs. Eventually, I realized it was from testing out Wii Fit Plus just days before. I also realized I’m somewhat out of shape.

So let’s talk about this chicken suit, for now I’ve mentioned in a few times without actually saying anything about it. There’s a balance game in which your Mii is dressed up in a chicken suit. Funny stuff, already. The object of the game is to flap your wings and fly from one pedestal to the next, and the game controls quite brilliantly. It’s as simple as standing on the Balance Board and holding your arms out to your side. No Wii Remote is needed. You just flap your arms like wings and lean in the direction you want to fly. The harder you flap your wings, the more altitude you gain. Flap slowly, and your flight is changed to depict that.

At first it felt a little weird, and with Nintendo reps and other writers milling about I did feel somewhat nervous and on the spot initially – but everyone was laid-back, cool, and having a great time – however, I was definitely having the best time. Soon enough I had this strange new flight control scheme down, and I was even quick to demo it for some people who missed my first flight. Flying from platform to platform felt great, and almost invoked a feeling of Pilotwings, especially toward the end of the level where the platforms were smaller and included targets – the object being that landing closer to the centre of the target would net more points. On the strength of this chicken suit activity alone, I would buy Wii Fit Plus.

But wait, there’s more! I also got to try out the Segway activity, in which you essentially play a jerk on a beach riding a Segway and popping beach balls while moles that resemble Resetti from Animal Crossing are trying to inflate them. Here, the balance board controls your forward/backward movement, while a Wii Remote held horizontal to the floor controls the steering. It was rewardingly fun to speed around the beach busting balloons, and I couldn’t help but think of Gob Bluth from Arrested Development through all of it. I even tried to run over some Miis that were having fun on the beach, but they all jumped safely out of the way just before I could hit them. It’s a family-friendly game, after all.

One of the cooler games, if you’ll forgive the pun, was the snowball fight. In it, players must use the balance board to duck in and out of cover while they use the Wii Remote to throw snow at other Miis. I’m a bit of a klutz, so I kept overstepping out from cover accidentally (the board is super sensitive in this game) but it was fun regardless. The sight of seeing a Mii take a snowball to the face is a hilarious one.

On the puzzle end of things, I was shown a neat game that’s somewhat reminiscent of early single-screen games that popularized the Game & Watch series of games. In this game – and sadly I cannot remember its name – players use the Wii Remote to control the tilt of one set of platforms while using the balance board to control the tilt of the second platform set. Balls of various colours drop from a ramp at the top of the screen, and using the tilting platforms players must guide each ball to the correct basket along the bottom of the screen. The Nintendo rep described it to me as a “patting your head while rubbing your belly” kind of activity, and that about sums up the challenge of it – while the game started out easy enough and gave me time to think about which platform I was supposed to tilt and which way I was supposed to tilt it, things got crazy soon enough.

As someone who never got around to grabbing Wii Fit, I’m really looking forward to Wii Fit Plus. I know it has been somewhat customary for people to buy new toys and then forget about them within a month, but I’m willing to bet all the extra content crammed into this new title will get people up and moving more and longer than before.

See our Wii Fit Plus Gallery »

Posted in First Impressions, Nintendo, Previews, Wii |