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Nintendo’s exercise game Wii Fit has returned to the top of the videogames sales chart, 14 weeks after it was first released. The game, which saw a 17 per cent jump in sales over the last two weeks has occupied the top spot in the sales chart on four occasions since its launch.

Wii Fit uses a motion-sensitive board to encourage players to develop their balance, strength and fitness levels.

The start of the Olympics in Beijing certainly had an affect on new sales of the fitness game wii fit as well as boosting exposure of other wii titles, including another Nintendo Wii game, Big Beach Sports, and Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games, in which the spiky blue hedgehog and portly Italian plumber go head to head in a series of athletic events.

In related Nintendo news, another Nintendo game, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, enjoys its 82nd week in the games charts, propping up the table at number 12. The game, which was released in 2006, is played on Nintendo’s handheld DS games console, and has been credited with bringing a whole new generation of “casual” players to the world of videogaming, especially women and young children.

Following in the trailblazing footsteps of titles like Nintendogs and Brain Age, Wii Fit is another brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto. The game was inspired by the practice of weighing oneself daily and, according to its creator, is more about self-awareness than it is about weight loss. The game that comes packed with a Balance Board peripheral doesn’t worry about plot or graphics or even new concepts in play, instead it focuses intently on motivating gamers to get on that board.

Wii Fit is in many ways the next step in Wii Sports, a title that boils gaming down to it’s most rudimentary elements of interaction and fun. But can even Miyamoto make tracking your BMI and doing Yoga interesting?

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The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has revealed 12 universities that will receive grants to research the use of video games as healthcare tools. Games have shown clear potential to serve healthcare, from helping stroke victims rehabilitate, encouraging seniors to exercise and teaching behavior for therapy. Exhaustive research and hard data will further drive the growth of games as healthcare tools for people of all ages, and the grant recipients aim to support this goal.

It’s about taking advantage of the burgeoning video game trend instead of attacking it, said Deborah Lieberman Ph.D., communications researcher at the University of California at Santa Barbara, during the organization’s announcement conference today.

“Research has shown you can learn whatever a video game offers. The question is, what are you going to teach?” said Lieberman.
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Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

So Nintendo showed up at our place today with a Wii Fit — and an accompanying personal trainer to crack the whip and make sure our half hour of intro exercises and fitness games burned a sufficient amount of calories. Things we learned: our BMI is on the upper end of the “normal” bracket (shocking, considering how sedentary we are blogging 12 hours a day), our balance is kind of crappy, our “body age” is 39 — over a decade more than our real age — and no, not even Nintendo can make a fitness game that doesn’t feel at least vaguely like PE. And now the 64k question:

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