Wii Fit Fun?

So, on Monday night we ordered a Wii/Wii Fit bundle from Target. It arrived yesterday and I played around with the thing for waaaay too long last night.

My first observation would be that you must must must wait until the children are in bed before breaking out the Wii. As enthusiastic as they are to play, a two year old and a four year old simply don’t yet have the mad gaming skilz required for simulated bowling, nor the patience to learn. They are able to pitch fairly easily in the baseball game as there is no button pushing required – but they get shelled – home run after home run – and they want to actually take turns – like after every pitch. This means I you spend more time moving the remote from wrist to wrist then actually playing games.

First thing I did was create Miis for everyone in the family. I did a pretty good job – Mine is bald with big, thick glasses, Marcy’s has red pigtails, chunky glasses and a half-bemused smirk. Once I finished with this, I moved on to setting up a profile for myself in the Wii Fit software. This is where the humiliation begins.

I enter my height and age and the balance-board thingy weighs me and am presented with my BMI. It’s not pretty, but then I knew it wouldn’t be. The real kick in the chops, however, is that the Wii then proceeded to take my Mii avatar, the one I created to look like me, and made it fatter! Asshole! And the Mii even got kind of slump-shouldered and depressed looking. It then went on to berate me as a couch potato and make fun of me after I performed various exercises.

Here’s the really perverse part about it. I enjoyed myself. This machine tells me to do stuff, I only manage to do the stuff it tells me to do half-assed, and then it makes fun of me and ridicules the way I did it. I’m grinning like a half-wit and laughing to myself and then hitting the continue button to play some more and suck at something else. This went on for hours.

Maybe this will help me get in shape, and maybe not, but can this really be good for my self-esteem?

I’m guessing my psyche can take the abuse.