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Walk With Me! Do You Know Your Walking Routine?
Nintendo attempts once again to get our fat gamer backsides off the sofa with Walk With Me! Do you Know Your Walking Routine?
Written by Chris Schilling, 03 July 2009
We'd be surprised if anyone is more concerned about the obesity epidemic than Satoru Iwata. It won't be long before his Vitality Sensor is measuring everyone's pulse so he can be certain none of his customers can go dying on him, so he can keep selling them updates of Wii Sports and Wii Fit, but for now he's making do with Walk With Me! Do You Know Your Walking Routine? - a non-game which measures the steps you take during the day and then calls you a sheep or a deer or a tortoise, depending on how active you are.
The hardware can't really be faulted - it can store information on the number of steps taken for around four weeks, and keeps in its memory the precise timing of the steps you took for two days. You simply need to press the button on the front to sync it to your DS, whereupon your created Mii (or the one you've imported from your Wii console) will appear and you can see how active - or inactive - you've been. Your step target is initially 3000 steps, which doesn't sound like too much, but when you're tapping away at a PC all day, it can be way out of reach unless you go for a lunchtime wander into the precinct and back. Yet it doesn't make you feel guilty about missing your targets, merely encouraging you to try to do more the following day, while giving you a separate mini-target like keeping your back straight and drinking more water.
A product of the nanny state, then? That's the cynical way of looking at it. While Walk With Me! doesn't really exploit the capabilities of its hardware in the software provided - merely offering a few minigames and rankings as visual reward for your progress - it does make you more aware of how much you walk, and how much you SHOULD walk, and so for that reason it's a success. A qualified success, but a success nonetheless. Though with the next Pokmon games arriving with a Pokball-themed pedometer, there will soon be a much more entertaining reason to go for an early morning or late evening stroll.
