Cheap Nintendo Wii

Nintendo raised a generation of couch potatoes on Super Mario and Donkey Kong, but Monday, the veteran video game company will complete its transformation into a healthy entertainment alternative with the release of Wii Fit.

Tapping into America’s endless appetite for fitness gadgets that promise workouts without the work, Wii Fit attempts to dull the painful drudgery of exercise with a shot of video game fun.

Just don’t expect to find a copy anytime soon. Online retail giant Amazon.com sold out days ago. And if European and Japanese releases of the game are any indication, Wii Fit will be just as hard to track down as the little white box it’s made for, the always-out-of-stock Nintendo Wii.

To add to the allure, Wii Fit comes with a new kind of video game controller, a wireless exercise board that senses the movement of the person standing on it. Looking like those plastic steps used in aerobics classes, it’s used in much the same way. Its inclusion is also the reason why Wii Fit will cost you $90 - that’s if you’re able to find one without eBay.

Wii Fit is, essentially, a set of exercises and physically active diversions ranging from authentic yoga poses and old-fashioned staples like pushups and stomach crunches to soccer games and Hula Hoop competitions. Most utilize the board.

A virtual physical trainer leads you in the exercises, and thanks to the board’s sensitivity, the trainer is often eerily aware of bad technique and poor form, correcting mistakes and preventing injury. The trainer’s awareness makes its occasional affirmations - “You’re pretty strong!” - feel all the more motivating.

The balance board also acts as a precise scale, which makes Wii Fit a good center to build a weight-loss regime around. The game records a daily measure of your weight and creates a chart showing your gains and losses over weeks and months.

While many of Wii Fit’s exercises can make you break a sweat (some of the yoga poses are downright torture), there are only so many physically challenging things you can do on the living room floor.

Most users will likely find themselves spending more time in Wii Fit’s game-like activities, such as the skiing scenario. It’s lighter on physical fitness and heavier on fun.

A bit of an odd review, this one, and we should ‘fess up at the start. We’ve not had a Nintendo Wii to review on our own testbed. Instead, we were invited to a house in the middle of London that Nintendo has kitted out with its brave new hope. The following is based on the several hours we spent hammering a number of games to death and generally getting to know the new machine.

Arguably, the Nintendo Wii is the most important console launch in some time. The reason? Its ethos is different. While Sony and Microsoft are happy to slug it out for the fast performance crown, Nintendo - as it did with the DS handheld machine - has popped off in the opposite direction and tried something different.

To an extent, Nintendo tried this with the Game Cube too, which it sold as a gaming box rather than any kind of multimedia machine. The result? It was perceived as a kids’ toy and the numbers nearly wiped Nintendo out of this particular segment of the console market.

That won’t be happening with the Wii, though. The first reason is a resurgent, confident Nintendo, whose persistence with its way of thinking has resulted in the huge success of the DS, where it was tipped to fail against the technically superior Sony PSP. The second reason is that Nintendo has been bolder with the Wii, and it really does deliver good fun.

The specs inside the box are fairly modest and well known, easily eclipsed by Sony and Microsoft’s latest console juggernauts. But it’s the way you interface with the machine that’s won the headlines to date, and rightly so.

The main Wii control looks like a remote control, albeit with a speaker and motion sensors built in. It’s a wireless device, and a flexible one at that. Using the Wario Ware Smooth Moves game, at times you need to turn it horizontally and grip it like handlebars, whereas in the tennis segment of Wii Sports you turn side on and swing it like a tennis racquet.

The tanks game within Wii Play and the boxing segments of Wii Sports require you to plug an extra controller into this remote, and the result is staggeringly intuitive. Picture a ten pin bowling minigame where you literally do a bowling motion. Or an air hockey-type game where you wave your controller around, with the movements replicated on-screen by your paddle. It’s delightfully simple and yet adds a genuinely fresh perspective to what otherwise would be fairly unspectacular software.

What’s more, when we went along, you could barely wipe the grin off our faces. The software titles that play to the Wii’s strengths are tremendous fun, accessible for all levels of gamer and contain plenty to enjoy. Multiplayer can be just awesome.

The box itself is small, lightweight and easily expandable. It’ll support old Game Cube games and controllers and it’ll also sport the Virtual Console, which we didn’t get a chance to play with, where you can buy and download old Nintendo classics for a couple of quid apiece.

There are downsides, of course. Much though we enjoyed first person shooter Red Steel - and that works a treat with the Wii controller - the graphical limitations of the machine shone through, against something like Call Of Duty 3 on Xbox 360. We also found that in one or two games the controller can be a little too sensitive, demanding that you point it exactly at the screen. And while the Wii-centric software we’ve seen is both great fun and exciting, we wonder how third party franchises will fare.

Yet these are minor points. Every one of us who went into the Wii house that day came back out with something new at the top of their shopping list. And that’s when Nintendo really plays its trump card, as the machine is selling for a princely £180 at launch, with the excellent Wii Sports bundled in.

That really is the gaming bargain of the season, and Nintendo deserves your support, your custom and your appreciation for continuing to take risks and innovate in a gaming market that otherwise seems a little stale. It isn’t the most powerful games console on the planet by any measure. But at this moment in time it’s by far the most interesting.