Wii Fit is the perfect game for forcing your kids to shape up. It comes with a wireless "balance board" you put on the floor in front of your TV. It looks like a weight scale, and at first it tells you how much you weigh and what your body mass index is.
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, and the board figures out if you are hula-hooping like an imbalanced amateur or a like a pro.
The great benefit 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. The game is mostly for beginners, since you can't string together a full workout program from its short bursts of challenges.
This exercise business is partly what the Wii promised it would deliver when it was launched in 2006. We still haven't seen the perfect Wii workouts, but the balance board gets us deeper into sweating while gaming.
