Genre: Edutainment/Sports
Publisher:  Nintendo
Developer:  Nintendo
Release Date: May 26, 2009

Well, color me somewhat unimpressed with this little DS accessory. 

Nintendo has rolled out its Personal Trainer line, which is a pretty decent idea on their part, since we know Nintendo has the development power to come out with some decent ideas and applications, like the popular Wii Fit.  Personal Trainer:  Walking, however, isn't what I had in mind.  It consists of a couple of pedometers and a DS cartridge that you can connect them to, but there's not a whole lot here that can't be offered up by garden variety pedometers that can be found at most stores, unless you really like looking at your Mii every day. 

Personal Trainer:  Walking comes with two pedometers, but it will actually support up to four.  The pedometers are small, about as wide as a quarter.  They're also pretty simple in design, with a flashing bulb on the front side to let you know that it's working, and a small clip that you can attach to the back of the device so you can secure it on a belt or other article of clothing.  I dropped it in my pocket and carried it around for a week, checking my progress daily to really get a feel for the device.  The game even suggest that you can attach the pedometer to a pet's collar, but keep in mind that it's a small device, and if it ever falls off, it'll probably end up inside your dog's belly, and that never ends well. 

The DS cartridge that comes with the pedometers has an infrared sensor built into it that allows your pedometer to unload its information into the system.  The game was set up to take in the information whenever I decided to start it up, but if I did so in less than 24 hours, it would ask me if I planned to continue using it that day or not.  There's an in-game clock that's tied into your system clock to keep track of your movement, and as you walk around, it'll count every step.  Once you deposit your daily information, you'll get a small graph that will tell you how many steps you've walked, whether you reached your daily goal (it starts out at around 3,000 steps), your peak periods of activity, and long periods of inactivity (basically when you went to sleep). 

Certain aspects of this information is certainly interesting, like seeing when your peak moments of activity occurred or seeing how long they lasted.  Another decent feature is after you use it for a few days, it'll compare each day to the one before it, to let you know when you changed your walking behavior, and if there were any changes in your periods of inactivity.  Basically, the walking tracking function works as well as any other pedometer I've seen, so while the device is fairly small, it does a solid job, as a pedometer should. 

However, I was expecting a bit more from the actual game cartridge.  I've come to expect a few things from exercise-based games such as Wii Fit, EA Active and a few older titles.  Most will give you goals or routines to follow, and some come equipped with mini-games to help you exercise more or give you some incentive to keep it up.  The only thing that Personal Trainer: Walking does is give you a step goal, which can change, and then it will toss health tips at you.  The health tips are pretty dumb, and they're not anything that you haven't heard before, like trying to cut more salt from your diet, etc.  The health tips felt like something you'd read on the cover off fitness magazines while you're in line at the supermarket, instead of actually imparting any real fitness information.

Along with that, the title is absolutely devoid of anything that resembles a game.  It tracks your steps, but it doesn't apply that to anything interesting, other than a "walk the world" function that tracks how many steps it takes to reach a certain monument or destination in the world.  There's little to no reason to check this out beyond any other pedometer you can buy, unless you like the idea of digitally logging information into something that equates to little more than a step journal.

There is support for Miis in Personal Trainer: Walking, which you can either transfer from your Wii or create from scratch, which is nice to see for those who enjoy their digital creations.  On the other hand, they don't serve any purpose in the game other than providing you with some type of avatar. 

I was also disappointed to see that this title has absolutely no connectivity to Wii Fit, which would have seemed like a natural fit.  Imagine tracking steps into Wii Fit to show calorie loss, weight loss, or change the somewhat plumpy Mii that the game had created for you.  It really seems like a lost opportunity to do some interesting connectivity, so it's really surprising that Nintendo dropped the ball on that aspect. 

While I'm not particularly excited by Personal Trainer: Walking, it does what it's advertised to do.  I think that Nintendo could have made the product a bit more interesting given the cartridge space, and asking people to fork over $50 for this seems a little steep, considering what you get out of it.  If you're on a fitness kick and you've been in the market for a pedometer, then this game will definitely fulfill that need.  Just don't go into this expecting it do much more than keep track of your movements and record them daily.