Personal Trainer: Walking (DS)

Make walking extra-super-fun!
8/5/2009 8:20 AM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Like politicians and their hookers, or the fact that firemen smoke, videogame writers have their own professional guilty secrets. Next to that neoprene bottle of vodka in the desk drawer, you'll find this hidden gem:

Game journalists worry that we don't give a game enough time before reviewing it. And we also worry that game fans will call us out for not completing all the Achievements in Fallout 3 before writing a review, or for not sticking with some indecipherable role-playing game until our girlfriends leave us, our wives divorce us, and we end up with adult-onset diabetes for staying indoors to grind up to level 99.

In short, we just worry that that we are not hardcore enough to give a game all of our heart before we take out our mightier-than-the-sword pen and start stabbing a crummy title in the face, over and over and over again.

And while it's just as well that critics think twice about the amount of time they spend playing before writing, the fact is, rarely -- if ever -- does a game get better as it goes on. Just to prove the point, I started "playing" Personal Trainer: Walking and haven't stopped, 70 days later.

Taking a whole month more than God needed to flood the earth, I concluded that what I thought about the game after the first day had stuck with me through my extended period of testing. Call it a lack of insight or imagination, a burned-in stubbornness or even laziness on my part. But I'd say that games are not that hard to judge up front -- and, in this case, first impressions are the only meaningful impressions you get.

In case you missed this oddball trifle from Nintendo, the basic idea is that you walk around with a small digital pedometer in your pocket or clipped to your purse, and every day you sync the little doodad with your Nintendo DS. A creepy Mii then gives you fitness advice, shows you a graph of how many steps you have taken, and describes your walking pattern in terms of an animal.

"It looks like you are a daytime ant!"

Sweet!

And when that grows tiresome, you can convert your steps into drawings of objects scattered across a teeny spinning globe, compare your walking distances to others' on the DSi network, and view various statistics of your walking patterns over the days you've been playing the game.

Wait a minute. Draw objects with your steps? Are you serious? You mean I have to store up 11,000 steps just to watch my Mii walk around creating a chalk outline and dropping clues that he is, in fact, going to show me a picture of a tomato?

To say I was perplexed the first time I encountered this mini-"game" was also to say that I would find it rather unusual to discover a Bigfoot in my house. Some things are just so out of place and odd that you wonder if it's just you who doesn't get what is going on.