Working up a Sweat

If you want to make your children play a video game they could possibly hate, "Wii Fit" is the perfect game to force them to shape up.

"Wii Fit" comes with a wireless "balance board" you put on the floor in front of your TV. It looks like a scale. And at first, you stand on it, and it tells you how much you weigh, and what your body mass index is.

In other words, it is an emotional torture device that will wreak havoc on your psyche.

Next, you decide which activities to engage in to lose weight. You can do stupid stuff, like hula hoop. You twirl your hips, which causes the balls of your feet to twirl, then the board figures out if you are hula hooping like an imbalanced amateur or like a pro.

The great worth of "Wii Fit" comes with its more serious workouts. You can do yoga, aerobics, step aerobics, push-ups and other strength training on the balance board, while a cartoon fitness trainer on the TV teaches you the correct stances while issuing motivational cheerleading.

This isn't a new concept. "Yourself!Fitness" has been on the market for years and is a more powerful instructor. But "Yourself" doesn't come with a balance board to keep you honest about whether you are standing correctly, and it doesn't gauge when you're taking a cheat-break. "Wii Fit," on the other hand, keeps its eye on you.

"Wii Fit" is mostly for beginners, since you can't string together a full workout program from "Fit's" short bursts of downward dog-type challenges. Sure, you can work your way up to more demanding routines. But I'm a longtime yoga-doer, and "Wii Fit" seems like kids' play to me.

That said, I did sweat on the push-ups and a few advanced stages, so even though I was complaining that "Wii Fit" is for kids, it kicked my butt a little.

The best reason this would be great for your kids is it comes with a calendar check-in feature. You can tell your kids you're not going to let them play other games until they've finished their "Wii Fit" program of the day. Afterward, you can look at the calendar that keeps tabs on them to make sure they worked out fully.

Once you own the "Wii Fit" balance board, you can use it with future Wii games. You already can use the "Fit" balance board with the new "We Ski" game, which is a straight-up skier with a workout benefit on the side.

In "Ski," the board reads your foot motions, as if on skis, while you hold the Wii remote controls as if they were ski poles. This makes for a fun, and fairly genuine, interactive ski game.

Then again, if you don't buy the "Wii Fit" to get the balance board, then "We Ski" is just OK without it, since you otherwise would just sit on the couch and feverishly row the remote controls.

All of this exercise business is partly what the Wii promised us it would deliver when it was launched in 2006. We still haven't seen the perfect Wii games and workouts, but the balance board gets us deeper into sweating while gaming.

("We Ski" by Namco Bandai Games retails for $30 for Wii -- Plays fun with the "Wii Fit" board, less so without it. Looks very good. Easy to moderately challenging, based on slopes you choose. Rated "E" with alcohol reference. Two and one-half stars out of four.)

("Wii Fit" with balance board by Nintendo retails for $90 for Wii -- Plays like exercising homework. Looks good. Starts easy and becomes very challenging. Rated "E." Three and one-half stars.)