Gamertell Review: My Weight Loss Coach for DS

Title: My Weight Loss Coach
Price: $39.99
System: DS
Publisher (Developer): Ubisoft (Ubisoft Montreal)
ESRB Rating: Everyone (use of alcohol and tobacco)
Pros: Friendly and encouraging, offers good advice, decent variety of activities and challenges
Cons: Pedometer is basically useless, doesn’t accept diet details, more about weight management than actual weight loss
Overall Score: Two thumbs sideways, 72/100, C-, 2 out of 5

My Weight Loss Coach from Ubisoft is not a weight loss coach, it’s a weight management coach. It’s a good habits coach.

It does a decent job of reminding you of the exercise and nutrition lessons you were taught back in school and it challenges to actually put the lessons into effect. But if you buy this game hoping it’ll help you quickly shed 10 pounds, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.

Put Me In, Coach. I’m Ready to Eat!

As the game points out, health isn’t about losing weight (especially losing weight quickly), it’s about balance: Eat right, then balance the amount of food you take in each day with the amount of exercise you put out. At the end of each session, the game evaluates your performance based on this balance. It’s all nice and friendly and you don’t get scolded for eating Chipotle burritos for both lunch and supper as long as you exercised the proper amount.

One of the drawbacks, though, is that you can’t tell it you ate a Chipotle burrito. When entering the day’s food intake, you can go with a “quick” option that allows you to just say your meals/snacks were light, balanced or heavy, or you can go with a more detailed option. The problem with the latter is that it’s not detailed enough. There’s no way to enter the exact calorie amount if you know it, and there aren’t nearly enough options to cover what you actually ate. So, the results are based on estimates, which may not be accurate.

Drop and Give Me 20, or Whatever’s Comfortable For You.

The proactive portion of My Weight Loss Coach is more useful, presenting you with daily challenges. There are physical challenges (do some jumping jacks, walk 6,000 steps, etc.), dietary challenges (drink some vegetable juice, quit using salt) and habit challenges (learn a new recipe, invite some friends over for a home cooked meal). I found these to be quite effective, and somewhat enlightening. Who knew I could grow to like V8?

Because the game knows only your weight, height and age, not all challenges make sense for everyone. However, you can decline challenges you can’t or don’t want to attempt. You can also determine the number of challenges you’ll accept in a day (one to six). The more challenges you complete, the more challenging they become. But the game remains friendly throughout, so you won’t dread your session if you weren’t able to complete the challenges. Just tell it what you did, track your progress, take some new ones, and come back tomorrow.

Yeah, Sure. You Walked 8,000 Steps. Right.

I wouldn’t mind this if the game sold for $19.99. Instead, it’s double that because of the included pedometer, which is absolutely terrible. After wearing it for the day, you plug it into the DS’s Game Boy slot when you turn it on, then tell My Weight Loss Coach to download your number steps. This capability makes the pedometer much larger than it needs to be, especially considering you don’t have to plug it in. You can manually enter your steps, so what’s the point of plugging in at all, other than the potential lack of honesty?

Worse, the pedometer often doesn’t work. A button on the outside resets your steps with only the slightest brush against your pants or another object. Not that it matters, because the pedometer would often reset itself even if I didn’t brush against the button. One time it even reset itself while I was plugging it onto the DS. I paid an extra $20 for this?

I Could’ve Had 50 V8s!

My Weight Loss Coach can certainly help improve your health by encouraging good exercise/nutrition habits, and is useful for tracking your progress. Keep up these habits, and yeah, you’re likely to lose some weight. More importantly, you’ll feel better and find yourself engaging in a healthier lifestyle. But go into it with your own realistic goals, not the goal that’s, you know, in the title of the game, and don’t pay $40 for it. Wait until you find it used for $20 without the pedometer, then buy one that actually works.

Site [My Weight Loss Coach] Read [DS Fanboy]