I'm sure most of you out there are like me and could stand to lose a few pounds. Well, with the help of your Wii and a balance board, Jillian Michaels is going to motivate you to do just that in Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009.

Graphically, it looks ok. There's nothing very special to it, but there's nothing really wrong with the scenery either. I was disappointed with the lack of character choices available. Practically everyone I know at least chooses a character that somewhat resembles them. That's really not possible for most people in this game. There are only 4 female and 3 male characters to choose from. Unlike Wii Fit which makes your mii fatter to resemble your height and weight, all the characters in Fitness Ultimatum are in shape. To balance out the lack of characters, there are quite a few songs for you to listen to that span 4 different genres. You can cycle through them easily as you play. You can also choose to play or not play whichever genres you want on the shuffle.

Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009 takes you to a "fitness boot camp." When you start a new game, the first thing you'll do is create a character. As I've mentioned, there's a severe lack of characters so just pick the closest that you can. After that, there are several camp locations that you can choose to go to. The Office is where you go to manage your character profile or create a new character. Each person can have their own character. You can change your clothes at the Office daily, if you want.

Of course, you have to eat when you're at camp. If you go to the Cafeteria, you'll find all the dieting tips that you have unlocked so far. The only problem is that you have to unlock these tips, so they don't give you anything to start your diet with. A lot of them are common sense anyway, though. Another thing you'll probably want to check on from time to time is your weight loss. You can find this and all the rest of your exercise records in Stats.

I am guessing that a large part of your camp time will be spent in Training. The first thing you tell it is whether you want to work on weight loss, intervals, strength training, or hill climb. Each of these are targeted with a different goal in mind. Then you tell it how long you want to train for and how hard you want your workout to be. After all that, you can then choose how many and which exercises you want to do. There are 11 different exercises total. You can also play with a friend if you choose Multiplayer. The one catch to multiplayer is that the balance board cannot be used in a multiplayer session.

Since you can specify the level of difficulty that you want for your workout, theoretically you should be able to just play for fun if you want. The problem is that the description of what you're supposed to do for the exercise is pathetic. You get a written description with a diagram of a person that's not moving. The description doesn't really explain any of them well and the diagram is more than useless. To make matters worse, you have a time limit on reading it. To me, it would make sense for you to press a button when you're ready to start. But I guess they didn't want your heart rate to go down too much. So you get less than 10 seconds to try and figure out what they want you to do. Some of them are relatively easy to figure out just by mimicking what you think you should do, like jogging or the handcar pump. Others, like the log jump, I never could figure out how to make them work. I managed to get the character to jump twice in 2 minutes. I was so frustrated that the Wii-mote just about got thrown through the TV.

This could all have been avoided simply by having a better visual for you or making it so that you had unlimited time to read it. There are some exercises on there that I will never attempt again, simply because I don't think a workout should consist of getting worked up over bad directions.

As I mentioned before, Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009 has 11 different exercises. Each of them has a different way that you are supposed to move the Wii-mote and Nunchuk and a different way that you're supposed to use the balance board. Not all of them are very intuitive though, and some are nearly impossible to figure out. The mechanics just don't work as well as I would like. Also, the cord between the Wii-mote and the Nunchuk is really a pain. When you're moving them quickly and it is hitting you every time, you start to get welts. The Cord-Free Nunchuk did work well on this game, but it is actually not needed. One really nice feature is that you can use a second Wii-mote instead of a Nunchuk. That's probably my favorite feature of the game.

I think that Fitness Ultimatum had the potential to be a great exercise game. The different exercise are well thought out and interesting. Unfortunately, given that they can be nearly impossible to play, I just can't recommend this game. You'll spend more time hopping up and down and trying everything just to get the exercise to count. Now maybe that's how they planned on you getting even more exercise, but I don't think so. Personally, I would recommend skipping this one. Maybe the next exercise game will be a little better.