A good tool masquerading as a game.
To call My Weight Loss Coach a game would be stretching it. There are a few (and I use this term lightly) "mini-games" revolving around health-related trivia. These mini games help the game to determine what kind of diet and exercise regimin would be appropriate for you as well as what kind of challanges (exercise or diet-change tasks) best fit your life style. Your MWLC mascot through all of this is a stick figure that matches your gender. I have a little stick man cheering me on everytime I entered exercise time or when I finished a challenge.
The most obvious feature of MWLC is the nifty little pedometer that comes with it. Unfortunately, all is does is count steps. There are absolutely no additional modes or features. It does plug directly into your DS to feed its count into MWLC with little to no effort on the users part, but in order to accomodate this functionality it ends up being kind of bulky. In addition to its size, it also suffers from the annoying need to be plugged into a DS that is completely powered off or MWLC won't recognize it. This is a problem for me because my favorite feature of the DS is the sleep mode where you can close the lid and it will conserve battery power without losing your spot on your game or turning the DS off. I find myself manually inputting the number of steps that the pedometer counted just so I don't have to turn the DS off to use the upload feature. All told, I'd rather have a smaller, perhaps more feature-filled (like showing a distance in miles or kilometers in addition to the number of steps) pedometer than the bulky one that has to be plugged into a powered off DS to work.
One thing that My Weight Loss Coach does right is help you track accountability. It uses a suite of tools including a diet-tracker that helps you keep track of what you eat and a nifty set of "challenges" that range from quick exercises (like, "Do 15 sits ups right now")to diet-altering tasks (like, "Put your salt-shaker back in the cupboard and leave it there"). You can always track what you eat, but there is a limit of 6 challenges that you can take each day.
In order to try and inspire you, MWLC presents you with several charting tools including a graph to measure your weight loss over time, as well as a nifty distance comparison showing you an equivalent example of how far you've walked (the first milestone you reach comes when you've walked about 10 miles and likens your journey to the same distace from the foot to the top of Mt. Everest).
All-in-all Ubisoft has put together a solid product in My Weight Loss Coach. They provide a simple to use set of tools that even the most novice DS owner can use. There is one major caveat, however. Anyone who purchases this game will only get out what they put into it, and even then this not a program that in-and-of itself will lead to weight loss. It is a guide. If you combine this tool with regular exercise, a good diet, and a little old fashioned self-restraint I think you could see some excellent positive results. However, the same can be said of that last sentence without using this tool as well. If you are going to spend the $39.99 on this software, remember that.