Nell McAndrew's Body Fitness

Here at Pocket Gamer we've seen a couple of fitness and diet applications pass across our mobile screens lately, but none have quite provided the ideal exercise companion. Now Nell McAndrew has lent her shapely profile to AMA's Body Fitness programme, so can she make the pounds melt away through the unlikely medium of thumb exercises?

Nell brings us a combination of diet and exercise regimes that the software attempts to tailor to your particular requirements. This customisation begins with just two sets of six questions. These cursory multiple-choice questions apparently quantify your level of fitness, typical weekly diet and your current exercise regime.

Now, it's tricky enough to entrust your health to a mobile phone application at the best of times, but when those quantifying questions only really offer up extreme answers – such as "When you go out for lunch, do you have a salad or a packet of extra thick lard?" (okay, not quite that extreme, but you get the idea) – you don't really feel as though you've summarised your state of health at all.

After each set, Nell diagnoses your lifestyle with the help of a few smilies, and some nebulous comments like, "Generally, junk food is bad for you," and, "It's good to keep active". She also hit me with a rather Freudian analysis by telling me I'm quite stressed. I had no idea! Up until playing this game, I honestly believed I was in high spirits.

An interesting function in Nell McAndrew's Body Fitness is how the system highlights the areas of diet and exercise it's deemed necessary for you on the next menu. Here it lists a series of headings for improving you rubbish lifestyle; warming up, cardio, stomach toning, hydrotherapy and so forth. The ones Nell thinks are particularly poignant for you are automatically highlighted, which does make it easier to understand what she was previously getting at.

Under these headings are non-interactive exercises and information on diet and toning systems. The inclusion of small, crudely animated figures to demonstrate these exercises is a good idea, but often the pictures don't appear to match the descriptions.

In the stomach exercises section, a workout called 'roll ups' (who'd have thought smoking spitty little gypsy fags would tone your abs?) appeared to have nothing at all to do with the animated figure, who kicked her legs rigidly in the air like a Thunderbirds puppet with its string cut.

The problems with the poor animations are only compounded by atrocious scrolling of the accompanying text. While it's not too bad where you control the scrolling with key presses, the sections in which the text cycles automatically are almost unreadable as it's nigh-on impossible to tell where the sentences begin and end.

After staring at the rotating lines for a few minutes, Nell McAndrew's Body Fitness becomes something of an irritating word game rather than an exercise companion.

To break up the monotony, a couple of mini-games are included as part of the relaxation programme, which is an admittedly pleasing feature. Neither Happy Croco nor Jog Mania would make particularly interesting games on their own, but it's good to see AMA has made some small attempt to bludgeon a bit of interest into Nell's unshapely software.

There's really very little in Nell McAndrew's Body Fitness that a few minutes of internet surfing or a pamphlet from the doctor's office wouldn't replace, and since the programming is quite abrasive and not as easy on the eye as Nell herself, the whole experience quickly becomes one of onerous toil.