Wii My Personal Golf Trainer with David Leadbetter (PAL)

I had this for a few months, it is not the same or even close to a leasson with your local pro, or even less with Mr. Leadbetter but it's a nice tool to train golf at home at the end of the day that can make a difference. It provides useful information to analyze your swing and it seems fairly accurate. It is a good start and I am looking forward to version 2.0.PROS: Drills useful to cure big flaws such a slice. Tremendous feedback many aspects and elements of YOUR ACTUAL full swing, including visual feedback. You can use this feedback to train at home with the program and improve your golf game in the virtual driving range or using the drills presented by Mr. Leadbetter. For the cost of a few leassons you can have this at home.CONS: Not their fault but you will miss the club weight and ball positioning. The Wii platform is slow and a program that uses so much resources becomes very slow as a result. It will be much better without the need to re-calibration of the board every other shot.What can be improved?:- Driving range feature shall allow you to use every club and shot (currently can only use Driver).- It should be easier to repeat drills without having to go through menus and recalibration again. Drills should be at least 10 repetitions not just three.- There is a very serious flaw with this program. The balance board needs recalibration way too often. Really frustrating. For instance every single shot in the golf course requires re-calibration of the balance board, a painful process that takes time and makes you lose focus and concentration.- There is need of recalibration also if you want to restart a drill, and you probably would like to restart because each drill only offers three repetitions.- The driving range is the only place where you can repeat shots without re-calibration of the board, but the only club you can use is the Driver.- The golf course feature allows you to use every club but requires re-calibration of the board every shot. So you will be feed up very quickly with this arduous process. Graphics are not good and the use of putter is awkward. I would have removed the golf course and added more features to the range.- The drills are presented in video by Mr. Leadbetter. He is in a golf course with a real club on his hands and never refers to the wii remote. The drill presentation appears always before a drill, even after you have watched it and done the drill many times.- Mr. Leadbetter does not take into consideration that you have a wii remote on your hand and not a club. Especially frustrating when he stresses how important is to feel the weight of the club head. In other words the drill video presentations seem copied and pasted from a Leadbetter DVD #you can buy his DVD's online for $20#- Expensive tool $99.99 for the program, $99 for the Wii fit and $199 for the WII (WII BOARD AND REMOTE NOT INCLUDED). I do not play videogames and had to buy the entire set.- Only right hand players.- It does not measure partial swings- No drills for short game or sand game.- In many drills balance is part of the drill but it will be great to include drills only to improve balance.- Other reviews complaint that feedback appears after every shoot in the course or driving range. I like that feedback but an option to turn off automatic feedback on the range or course could have been easely added.- You cannot use your Mii. The default player is bold, not that I care but is weird.- Sometimes the wii remote does not respond properly and you end with a very odd position to complete the drill, or cannot just complete it.EDIT:three months later, I have used it around 25 times for 20-30 mins, my scores in the real course have gone down 2-4 strokes per round. Pretty much no slice anymore. It is however very hard to be motivated and keep up with the program. And sometimes the wii remote does not read properly on the WII. One star goes.2 years later: barely any use any more still a pain to use. I bought a Chickenstick (aka Simstix) but does not work with this software. It will be nice if it was compatible with it.-- too bad a new version was never created correcting any of the flaws above

If only a little common sense was used by the designer/developer, this could be a great program. As it is, though, if is the most frustrating, aggravating POS imaginable.Start with the basic design - the program consists of a series of hierarchical modules that are bloated with video and take forever to load. It would not be to bad it you only had to wait through one or two of these to get to where you were going, but that is not the case. And since they didn't include anyway to get out of exercises or other places within the program, you have to reset and reload the program just to get back to a menu.I don't know what they were thinking with the balance board. Aside from having to re-calibrate it with almost every swing, you will quickly run into cases where it does not want the board and it will not continue unless you go all they way back to the settings to turn it off. Then you get to go through one long pause after another to get back to where you were. Of course, next time you get to a point where you want to use it and it will work with it, you'll have to go all the way back to turn it back on.And that's not the worst of it! For some reason, they thought it was important that you must simultaneously press the 1,2,a, & B button in order to use the controller as a club. Didn't they know that all controllers are not alike and not all people's hands are of the same size? If there was any point to this absurd requirement, it would be understandable - but still unworkable. Perhaps no one told them that a wii controller is not the same size or shape of a golf club handle. I find myself repeatedly unable to finish exercises or playing the courses because I can't keep all the buttons pressed all the time.Seriously - expect to lose 5 minutes messing with the program for every one minute of instruction or training. It's too bad this is such a mess - the instruction and exercises are good! But after trying repeatedly over a couple years to make productive use of it, I have given up.

I had read some of the negative reviews but still went ahead and purchased it because I thought it was a cool idea and just hoped that people were being over critical. They were not. Its really just a bad user experience all around. Boring stupid videos of Leadbetter, needless repeated calibration of balance board, and worst of all, just not enough useful information.Also, they make you hold the Wii remote in a particular way : hold down 1&2 buttons and the B button, before starting any swing. This makes using products like the Chicken Stick (real golf grip with Wii remote holder, with B button extension switch) impossible to use.There are many other annoyances here, really too many to go into, but here is one more. Looking at my swing analysis it noted a "Sway during back swing" (detected using Balance board). But one I couldn't really see what they were talking about from the visual playback, and two there was no good explanation of what that meant or how one might fix it.The drills are really annoying too. I couldn't even get my hands in some of the positions they wanted me to, but they'll keep repeating things like "move your hands a little more behind you", "rotate your hands clockwise", etc.I'm a 15.5 handicap, I can play golf, but was looking for a way to keep up during the winter months.The Wii Fit Plus comes with a Driving Range game. You use the balance board with it and its much better at letting you visualize your balance. So I say, stay with that and Tiger Woods 2011 or similar.I'm giving this 2 stars instead of 1 because I still like the concept, they just need to put a whole lot more work into it. Wait for 2 or 3 versions from now (if they make it there) and then check it out.