My Weight Loss Coach First Look

Feel like you could stand to lose a couple of pounds? Yeah, same here. Luckily, there's a genre of games out there that aim to do for people what self-help cassettes did for our parents. You've got mind-expanding games such as Brain Age and its ilk, as well as Nintendo DS games that will help you with your foreign-language skills, and a new wave of games that look to do for your body what the aforementioned games do for your mind. The most obvious example is the upcoming Wii Fit, but Ubisoft has its own entry for the body-conscious gamer: My Weight Loss Coach for the Nintendo DS. We had a chance to see the game at the most recent Nintendo Media Summit in San Francisco.

My Weight Loss Coach is essentially a way to record your physical activity and give you the daily nudge in the direction of fitness thanks to the coaching sessions that make up the majority of the game's presentation. There are 10 coaching sessions on hand that display basic information on health and fitness, and they will also present you with numerous ways to keep track of and improve your health in the form of challenges. These challenges will range from the very simple (stand up and sit down 10 times in a row) to more challenging (such as walking a certain number of steps in a day).

Although you won't be doing push-ups or yoga on top of your Nintendo DS, a la Wii Fit, you will still be able to keep a fairly accurate record of one aspect of your physical activity; the game will come packed in with a pedometer that you can clip on your belt or waist during the day. Afterward, you can connect the pedometer to the GBA slot on your DS and it will record the number of steps you walked that day. This will be integrated with the session routines you do during the game--one session challenge might ask you to walk more steps than you did the previous day--and the game will keep track of your progress as you go.

With a bare-bones presentation (your coach is really just a stick figure), My Weight Loss Coach players will be counting on the game's content to be more appealing than its visuals. It's tough to call My Weight Loss Coach a game--it's really more of an interactive journal--but it does seem to be turning out as a nice tool for those looking for some accountability with getting into shape and staying that way. The game is due for release later this year.