As you play Wii Fit, it banks "credits" for you, and as you earn enough, you unlock various new activities. I'd thought you could choose what you wanted to spend them on, but it turns out, the game just unlocks them for you in its own order, spreading them out pretty equally. After a week, I haven't unlocked everything yet, but I'm closer than I'd expected to be.

The first drawback I've found with Wii Fit is that the aerobic activities aren't terribly effective. I do enjoy hula hooping, for some reason, and if you do it long enough, you'll almost break a sweat. Sometimes doing activities unlocks new ones, and other times it unlocks a harder difficulty. So instead of doing hula hooping for 3 minutes, you do it for 10. Or 10 reps of push-ups instead of 6. I appreciate the game easing you into things so you don't try to push yourself too far too fast. Jogging is getting a little old, and I wish there was music, but I think I might really enjoy the rhythm boxing. Just need to do it a little more.

Strength training and yoga can be effective if you do them right. And since there's an on-screen indicator for many of the exercises telling you if you're keeping your balance, you know if you're doing it right. After the first couple days, I could really feel it in my shoulders and sides. Heck, after just a couple days, I was startled to find myself actually sitting upright at my desk at work. I have terrible posture, so that was like a major breakthrough for me!

Doing the body test every day isn't really necessary because it doesn't change that much in a 24-hour period, so I figured I'd do it once a week or every few days. But then, one day, I was doing my thing, and in between activities, an alert came on screen telling me that my stats had changed since the last time. So I did a test and found I'd lost about a half a pound. Go figure. It's a little creepy that the game's monitoring you without your knowledge, but it was good news, so I didn't mind!

My main complaint is that there's no way to string together activities in a playlist or anything like that. You might play Wii Fit for 30 minutes, but you're probably only going to rack up 19 or 20 minutes of actual activity time with all the menus and navigating. Sometimes it suggests combining yoga and strength training exercises for increased effectiveness, but doesn't seem to give you any way to actually do that, aside from just choosing one and then the other. I would've liked a workout routine where you could choose what you'd like to focus on (aerobics, strength, yoga) and then input a time length for your workout. Then the game's instructor would take you through a series of exercises to that goal. And it could randomize them, so you don't keep doing the same things and getting bored. As it stands now, you have to pick and choose what you want. And not knowing what I'm doing, I'd appreciate being told what would be most effective towards reaching my goals. I expect at some point, I'll start alternating yoga and aerobics/strength. But we'll see.

I'll have more for you next week!