Okay – in the interest of full disclosure, I don’t do Wii Fit as much as I used to.  If at all possible, I’m doing long walks to get my exercise instead of hopping on the Wii.  The Wii is lucky to see me turn it on once or twice a week at this point.  However, I found Wii Fit Plus available on NewEgg without a balance board for $20.  It’s easily worth that.

While I haven’t verified it, it almost looks like you can toss your Wii Fit disc once you install Wii Fit Plus.  It’s possible that your save data is relocated, but switching between the two might have some undesired consequences.

The good news is that everything that was available to you in Wii Fit is now available to you in Wii Fit Plus … and more!  Wii Fit Plus adds an additional category of exercises (as well as a few new exercises to the Strength and Yoga menus), but the drawback of how they do it is that it can sometimes be unclear as to where these exercises might fit in the Yoga-Strength-Cardio-Balance hierarchy.  These exercises include a new “Basic Run Plus”, “Rhythm Kung Fu”, “Island Cycling”, and “Bird’s Eye Bulls-eye”.  They can be pretty fun to do.

It also adds the ability to put together and save a regular routine of strength and yoga exercises you can do, and lets you know how long it will take to complete them.  This, I think, is one of the key new features of Wii Fit Plus.  Instead of being scored on any of the exercises, you simply do the exercises and then at the end you’re given the appropriate amount of time credit.  There’s very little time between switching from exercise to exercise, so my primary bit of advice is to put exercises together so that you’re not constantly moving your balance board around between exercises.  Group your exercises within your routine so that all the ones that utilize the balance board in a particular location in the routine are all together.

The only bad part so far of the routine building is that I haven’t figured out how to change the “difficulty level” of the exercises you’re doing – it seems to only add the “basic” level, so if you want to do more repetitions of a given exercise, you can’t do anything other than just add additional entries of that exercise into your list.  So, instead of saying “I want to do 20 reps of this exercise per the ‘advanced’ version, and then move on to the next exercise,” you have to set it up like, “I want to do 10 reps of this exercise, and then the next exercise is another 10 reps of the same exercise.”  At this point I’m having a hard time believing that this is the kind of design oversight that would slip through.  But it’s possible …

If you have Wii Fit and use it two or three times a week, you might find it worth the money to pick up Wii Fit Plus (and since you already have the balance board, you should be able to get away without spending the money on another one).