The Board
The board itself feels incredibly sturdy as I suppose it has to be for people to be standing and leaning on it constantly, but I had been worried since in my mind Nintendo is only 50/50 on their extra Wii controllers – the zapper being a piece of flimsy plastic crap and the wheel actually feeling good and sturdy. No worries with the board though. It’s heavy but not too heavy and clearly meant to be stepped all over as it doesn’t feel like it’s going fall apart if you shove it around a little. I wouldn’t throw it at a wall or anything but even if you did the wall might lose. The top of the board actually feels quite comfortable on your bare feet with two rougher areas for you fit to stand on on either side of the platform, though the white coloring leads to one realizing just how dirty their feet are after wearing flip flops all day. The foot and half width is plenty wide for any stance I would suppose but the length is not for people with big feet. I wear a size 13 (in the US) shoe and my toes and heels were running over the raised parts of the board before the edge. Not over the edge, mind you, but the bump was a enough to be a bit uncomfortable. Luckily it’s Wii Fit so you’re moving your feet and legs pretty often and I never got to the point where I needed to step off the board from discomfort. Also of note are the four plastic pads that you can screw on to the Wii Board in order to raise the platform higher in case you are playing on a carpet. The bottom of the board needs to be off the ground evidently in order to measure balance.
The board runs on four AAA batteries which was a surprisingly small amount in my mind for something that seems to be doing a lot of electronic stuff, but I guess if you think about it it’s just doing a Wii remote’s job but with a scale instead of motion sensors. Thankfully Nintendo is kind to us gamers and included four batteries in the box. After popping them in I assumed, since I’m an intelligent gamer and don’t need to read manuals, that I’d just hit the sync button next to the batteries and then the one on my Wii. So I did just that and waited watching the blinking light on the Wii Boards power button, which is conveniently located in a place you can turn on with your foot. It blinked and the blinked some more. So I tried to sync again. Nothing. “Ha!,” I thought, “I’m going to tear Nintendo a new one for this.” Well, I can’t since it was my own fault. You have to have a game that uses the Wii Board in your Wii in order to sync it. In fact if I had bothered to insert Wii Fit into my Wii I would have been prompted once I started up the game to sync my board. I did do this and the board synced up quickly and easily.
And like that, I was prepared to exercise with a Nintendo console, a thing I had never even dreamed of doing.
