You'll know Ubisoft's My Weight Loss Coach when you see it: it's the one with the pedometer sticking out of the GBA slot of the Nintendo DS.

The pedometer is a sturdy but fairly nondescript cartridge about half the size of a Nintendo e-reader. It's got a simple LCD readout to count your steps, and a belt clip so it can be taken with you on the go. NWR director Steven Rodriguez wondered aloud while examining the contraption whether wearing the pedometer while playing Wii Fit would allow users to kill two birds with one stone, working out for both games at once.

The My Weight Loss Coach software itself is on a separate game card that plugs into the regular DS slot. Completely built around intended everyday use of the included pedometer, My Weight Loss Coach is more of a lifestyle tool than an outright game. After a day's exertion, you plug in the pedometer, upload its data, and My Weight Loss Coach will track your progress with charts and readouts that for individual days accessed through a calendar. If you've forgotten to take the pedometer along with you, I was told that My Weight Loss will even let you enter general exercises and the game would estimate from there.

Through tracking your steps, the game will be able to display the number of miles (or kilometers if you're metric like that) you've traveled in all, and highlight major milestones in an album. I was surprised that the very first achievement had already been unlocked in the playtime afforded by at the summit: the game file had logged enough steps to have walked Mt. Everest! With that as the very first and easiest milestone, I figure there's nowhere to go for walkers but up!

Additionally, you can enter and update your height and weight (thus calculating your BMI) and use the touch screen to track your eating habits by selecting preset food items and letting the game approximate your caloric intake from there. Based on all these factors, the game offers suggestions and new challenges for you to undertake as time goes by.

Some of these are pretty straightforward ("Walk 10,000 steps in a day"), but I was surprised to see some more inventive options as well ("eat out less: invite a friend over for a home-cooked meal"). Each of the challenges are also labeled with the amount of time you'd have to dedicate to get them done – some take only a minute of your time – so users will have full knowledge of what they're getting into before they choose a challenge to undertake.

In addition to challenging users to be more physically active, My Weight Loss Coach also tasks users with improving their general health knowledge. The game features a small variety of quiz minigames, all asking questions like "which [of the displayed food items] has the most fiber?" or "how many steps does an average American take in a day?" Additionally, the game has a coach mode, which is more like a series of informational seminars on your DS on general health topics and strategies like walking.

Throughout all of this, you'll be accompanied by the game's most pleasing feature: a friendly stick figure on the top screen encouraging you on, charmingly animated throughout each of the game's modes. In some quiz minigames he (or she) will even turn into a sort of animated hang-man: your first wrong answer will pop a leg out of existence, causing him to start hopping in place comically. I'll have to admit that as soon as I realized this, I amused the Ubisoft employee presenting the game by re-starting the minigame and getting as many questions wrong as possible just to see what would happen to my little avatar.

Ubisoft told me that they knew that exercise wasn't the most exciting subject in the world, so they tried to give users as much fun as they could with the quiz minigames and stick figure mascot. It may not be a whole lot, but these touches give a little bit of quirk and charm to the low-impact, low-confrontation health and activity tracker that My Weight Loss Coach adds up to.