Posted 06/30/2008 7:00 PM by Gerry
Filed under: DS, Health, Heather, My Weight Loss Coach, Nintendo, Test, Ubisoft
Now that video games are having you do everything from pretend-bowling to pretend-yogaing, it's getting tough to keep track of all of those pounds rolling off. Ubisoft's new release My Weight Loss Coach hopes to target "male and 
female DS owners 20-years-old and above who have difficulties reaching and maintaining their target weight because of lack of motivation, time or daily life constraints." In other words, they want to make fat, lazy college kids less fat and less lazy. How do they propose doing this? Make losing weight a video game, of course.
This got me to thinking—where can I find someone to test out this wonder of modern weight loss? Luckily we have one curious staffer who saw the bright, shiny box and quickly volunteered to put it through its paces. Her name? "Heather." Her height? "5-foot-11." Her weight? "Uhhh... varies." When asked what her motivation was, she replied, "My sister's wedding is in a month and I want to pretend to lose weight." Good 'nuff for me.
Now that you met the contestant, let's see what this $39.99 marvel can do...
First thing's first, obey your thirst. The game begins the weight loss extravaganza by making you drink a cup of water...
Mmmm, tasty. Well that was a good start, I guess. The next phase ordered Heather to take 50 steps, counted by this pedometer included with the game:
Your reward for complying with each command is this scrawny stick figure guy attempting to make you feel like you're not making a fool of yourself:
Heather took a 30 minute rest after the first phase and when she opened up the game later, she was bossed around some more, forced to stand up and sit down 10 times...
Then the game makes you go find any kind of packaged food and read the nutritional facts. Unfortunately our test subject got a little sweet tooth while reading and kind of fell off the wagon...
After all of the hard work on Day One, we asked Heather if she felt like she lost any weight, to which she replied, "I'm hungry."
