As with other Personal Trainer titles, Walking is less of a game and more of a toy or tool. I was given a copy of Personal Trainer: Walking a few months ago and have put it through its paces on a regular basis since then. This Nintendo DS title, which comes with two electronic pedometers, is an enjoyable diversion that might just help raise your awareness of your activity levels. I found it didn’t spur me on to significant lifestyle changes but it was able to demonstrate to me whenever I started to fall into a bit more of a sedentary lifestyle.

The idea of Personal Trainer: Walking is for users to put one of the two included electronic pedometers into their pocket or clip it onto their belt. (Or onto your collar if you’re a dog, as that is an additional mode available.) Then, go about your normal day, and the pedometer will record how many steps you take at what time throughout the day. At the end of the day, the recorded data can be downloaded into your Nintendo DS and analyzed. Your longest continuous sections of walking as well as your longest periods of downtime are analyzed and compared to previous results from the past month. Players create a “step target” and when that is reached the small LED on the pedometer begins to flash green instead of red. When the walking data for a given day is analyzed, you place a stamp on the calendar, with a smiley face indicating a good day and a frown a poor one. Make your step target for the day and the stamp is green, otherwise it shows up as red on your calendar page. In addition to your step target, each day you are presented with something to do to better yourself like walk with better posture or encouraged to eat right. The game checks up on you the next day during the download process. Your walking information is stored and can be recalled and examined on a day by day, week by week, or month by month process.

Once you’ve recorded your steps for the day, you can use accumulated steps to play a few activities. (I’d call them minigames, but they aren’t really games.) The game will combine your steps with other players (it can track up to 4 players and the game comes with two pedometers) to calculate how much power you are creating to light up a small town. Walk more (and in sync with other players) and you generate more electricity and more items in the town light up. This was amusing at first, but it doesn’t take long to light up the entire town and then there isn’t anything new to discover. The most interesting activity is a “Walk the World” one where you spend your accumulated steps to unlock items on a globe view. The items are slowly drawn out as you work through steps (many take more than one day of walking to reveal) and also contain hints and information about the objects. I found reading about the various objects (the space shuttle, interesting animals and plants from around the world, various geological formations, etc…) entertaining and always enjoyed having enough steps to unlock the next stage. One final entertaining mode is the Space Walk. If you can use the DS to go online, you can check in with global walking totals to see how close you are to walking to the moon, etc… (It takes 548 million steps.) Step totals of other users from around the world are also posted.

Personal Trainer: Walking is very much a “gimmick” game. If you enjoy the “gimmick” of knowing exactly how many steps you took that day, you will enjoy the game. Strapping the pedometer onto your dog is also good for a hoot to see how much activity they produce in a day. The “Activity Meters” (the pedometers) included with the game are fairly robust, I dropped mine on hard surfaces on more than one occasion. They are mildly waterproof, but since you keep them in your pocket all day be careful with the washing machine. I can attest they don’t survive the wash cycle (rain should be OK, but no swimming.) While the title rarely increased the amount of walking that performed throughout the trial, it did a good job of reminding me whenever my life was making me a bit too sedentary. As someone who just loves to gather and look at information, having something that tracks my daily activity is a fun and easy thing to do.

Kid Factor: Very little text to worry about in this program so if a child wanted to monitor their walking using this (or a parent and child compete over number of steps, etc…) the title should be able to take care of it. Since the game comes with two pedometers (and can support tracking up to 4 of them if you buy extras) it can be a fun way for families to track exercise together. There are even leaderboards on the cartridge so you can see who has the most walking, most target days reached, and so on. The only drawback I see, is that everyone needs to be able to share the same cartridge to download their walking statistics daily. (The pedometer stores information on a longer time scale, but the game really encourages you to submit your data daily if at all possible.)

Tags: Game Reviews