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Sparkle (1)
I received the game Zumba Fitness for the Wii for my birthday, and today I gave it a go for the first time.
I've been meaning to set the Wii up for the entire time I have lived in my current house and we moved in about 18 months ago! I've missed Mario Kart but obviously not enough to go to the effort of plugging the scart, power and sensor wires in! I don't know why I put it off, as it didn't even take an advert break during Grand Designs to set it all up.
The Zumba Fitness game comes with a belt to go around your waist to hold the controller, and a quick google leads me to believe that it generally costs between £20 - £30 on the internet.
There is quite a lot to the game; once I had created a profile & selected the easy level, I started off with some tutorials. There are tutorials into using the game, but these are only really needed if you are new to the Wii, as well as tutorials for several dance steps, and different types of dancing too.
You have a go for a few minutes at following the moves that the lady on screen is doing, starting off slowly and simply before building the dance move up to its full speed version. I found this useful but it would have been even better if you were talked through the moves too; for example left foot forward, right back, both feet together now etc. The instructor on screen seemed to turn green as you got the moves right, but as this is just based on movement of the Wii controller in the belt, as long as you jiggle at the right times you can convince the game that you are doing well. This makes it quite difficult to gauge exactly how well you are doing. I imagine if you are bothered about getting the dance steps exactly right, the Xbox Kinect version would probably be more accurate for the specific moves, but to be honest I could tell whether I was almost right or if I was moving the wrong leg/arm in the wrong direction!
Then there are different sections to the actual game. You can perform a set routine, picking from the different types of dance and difficulty levels (beginner, intermediate and expert). I had a go at a couple of these and had quite a lot of fun, and I was able to keep up with the majority of the moves and soon got the hang of the dance routines. These took about 4 minutes each to complete, which I think was the length of the song being played in the background. Having never been to a Zumba class I'm not sure what kind of music is played, but the music seemed appropriate for the dance style.
Other ways to play are to complete a Zumba Class - there are different difficulty levels and time durations to pick from. This is how I imagine I will normally play the game, on my own as if I'm at a fitness class.
There is also Zumba Party; I didn't play on this selection so I will have to report back another time.
Overall I probably 'danced' for about 15 minutes, not really putting a lot of effort in as I've been ill this weekend and didn't want to over do it. I still ended up sweating and out of breath, although that could say more about my level of fitness! It was good fun and I'll definitely play this again, and hopefully I'll get better :)
Cartoon Characters Dancing Image Credit: meganjo
