Follow That Dog, Part 1

My wife and I recently purchased Wii Fit. My initial reaction wasn't entirely positive, but it's kinda been growing on me. Honestly, though, if my wife weren't encouraging me to lose weight, I don't think I'd have the patience for it.

A few days ago, a friend of mine blogged about some things his Wii Fit had done to surprise him. One of these involved the running game. There's certain key points where, if you "accidentally" outpace your trainer, you can start chasing a dog instead. The dogs take you on completely different trails, so you get to explore more of the island.
Last night, I outpaced the trainer and followed a dog, that lead me to another dog, that lead me to another dog. I now know that in addition to the three trails the game menus tell you about, there's at least 5 other alternate trails. This made me curious, so I did a quick google and a scan of various cheat sites. Most of them are wrong.

Some of them report that the dog appears when you outpace your trainer. That's what I thought at first, but I've since tested it and it's not true. Outpacing your trainer when there's a dog on screen will switch you to chasing the dog, but outpacing your trainer when there's no dogs around does you no good (as near as I can tell, anyway). I thought maybe it would summon a dog, but that theory doesn't hold up to testing.

Some of the sites report that the dogs appear at specific places. That seems mildly inaccurate to me as well. For example, I've seen it claimed that the dog appears in front of the "single house with a mii out front" on the short run. While it's true I can often find a dog there, the same dog sometimes passes me well before that, when I'm on the trail that goes through the rock archway. That implies to me that the dogs have preset circuits they go on, and your speed determines when, where, (and if) you run into them. I'll have to test it further to know for sure.

Most cheat sites claim that there's 3 or 5 dogs. However, there may be a 6th, because the other day I walked into the living room while my wife was following a dog on a trail I'd never seen. She was unable to explain to me where she'd run into the dog. Taking all that into account, there's a good possibility that there are more dogs than the five I know about, and that I just haven't got my timing right to find them. I see dogs going the other way, for example, and have no clue how to follow them. As I indicated, there doesn't seem to be a thorough or accurate guide to the Wii Fit dog trails on the internet. The best I've found is some videos on AOL that show you 4 alternate routes. I've seen a comment on a forum where a guy claims to have found 12 alternate trails, but he may have been smokin' something, as he didn't describe any of them. Some random guy on yet another site claimed there were 15 trails. Wiifit.org claims each time you follow a particular dog they cycle through a list of different routes, but that hasn't matched my experiences thus far. No site documents any alternates in Free Run or 2-Player modes, but neither does any site claim there aren't any in those modes. The information just isn't out there.

For some reason, I've got enormous curiousity about this stupid trail variation mystery. So, I've decided to do something about it. My plan is to do a different run every day, at varying speeds, and do my best to record here every dog I encounter, and where they take me. It'll be an ongoing series.

I realize most of my readers are here to read my rants about RPG mechanics and steal my campaign ideas, :) so don't worry, this isn't a sign of some major change to the site. No matter how obsessively I may try to explore the Wii Fit jogging game, my primary focus here is and will remain on tabletop RPGs, with just a bit of sideline diversion into board games, LARP, card games, computer games, etc. I expect to be doing 4 to 7 of these posts a week for just a couple weeks, at which point I'll have completed all the trails I can find (or have decided it's not worth pursuing further). I also expect the posts will be pretty short. They will all be titled "Follow That Dog" so you can easily ignore them if you're not interested, and I understand and expect that most of you won't be.

The format, should anyone care, will be something like this:
Run Type: Short, Long, Island Lap, 2-Person Run, Free Run, etc
Dog Color: Self-explanatory, and unimportant. I'd skip this, except I think it will make it easier for me to find the multi-dog trails and know whether or not I'm just repeating myself.
Met At: A description of the part of the trail where I met this dog, and how far on the distance meter that location is. If I was running particularly fast or slow to be at that location at that time the dog got there, I'll mention it.
Destination: A description of the final location the dog lead me to.
Along The Way: If anything particularly cool or entertaining happens en route, I'll share it, but this is a purely optional part of the entry and likely won't happen to often. I know there's at least one feature of one trail I'll want to discuss.

Should a run involve following more than one dog, I'll include that detail, probably by having multiple Dog Color, Met At, and Destination entries, numbered in sequence.