At the time of writing, Wii Fit is sold out everywhere. You can't get one for love nor money (though if you must try, may I suggest the latter?) and it seems like the lifestyle 'game' is going to be another money minting machine for Nintendo. On the other hand, there's a wave of cynicism surrounding the product - the words "gimmick" and "fad" have been shot around with reckless abandon, and many reckon that the fitness board is going to be at the back of people's cupboards within a few weeks. Nintendo are no stranger to the gimmick accusation, of course, and so far have done rather a good job of proving people wrong. Does this buck the trend?

Well the first act of 'getting fit' you'll be doing is lifting the box without getting a hernia. Yep, the sizable box the product is in (bigger than the Wii's packaging) is quite a hefty weight itself, and unless you've had it delivered (in which case your postman is probably planning to put unpleasant things through your letterbox) your workout program begins from the second you hand over your money. The second act of fitness the game gives you is the savage beating you give the board when it tells you that you're overweight! It's quite hard to define the feeling you get when a bit of plastic informs you that you weigh too much, especially when said piece of plastic is far from svelte itself!

It's a solid piece of kit, though. If you found yourself initially balking at the price of the thing (as I did), you'll be pleased to know that this is some sophisticated technology. Solidly constructed and holding a weight of up to 23.5 stone (thankfully something I haven't been able to test!) the only real issue you should have with the balance board is storing the thing, and working through batteries. The board's function is to be able to tell exactly how much weight is being applied to any given section, which gives it reliable feedback on whether you're doing things right, whether it's one-handed push-ups or some elaborate yoga pose. The reliability of the peripheral is tested when you log in as the wrong person - my girlfriend could not get the board to respond to the step class when it was configured to me, because it was set to react to my weight only. Impressive stuff - indeed, even standing on it logged on as someone else prompts the game to inform you that your weight seems to have changed. There's just no fooling it!

Once you have gotten over the novelty of another piece of shiny white plastic sitting underneath your television, what does Wii Fit actually entail? Well, upon loading it up for the first time, you're weighed and given an initial fitness age, a la Brain Training. Brushing you into underweight, average weight, overweight or obese depending on your BMI, the game then asks you to set some goals for yourself - to lose a certain number of pounds by a certain date, for example. This is purely for your own records and although the game does remind you of your target and informs you as to how you're doing, it doesn't suggest any kind of program to help you achieve your goals. It's also worth noting that Wii Fit will let you set ridiculously unhealthy targets - like losing eight stone in a week, which seems to be some kind of recipe for the board being abandoned in a cupboard for the next few years. Nor does it offer particularly helpful feedback on your weight either; in one of the rare instances where the Wii board badly mis-measured and claimed I'd lost eleven pounds overnight, the balance board merely congratulated me on my weight loss rather than telling me to look up 'tape worm' in a medical dictionary!

Once the initial setup process is complete, you're encouraged to weigh in every day and to get your fitness age. To assist this, you can even install the test channel to your Wii menu, which is a masterstroke for keeping you motivated. Other than that, you can undertake training to help you improve your weight, posture, balance and muscle tone. These aspects are helpfully divided into four categories: aerobic, yoga, balance and muscle, and each has a selection of activities at varying difficulty levels with more unlockables to reward you for putting the time in. There's an in-game clock to show you how long you've spent playing and at certain points (ten minutes, fifteen minutes, etc.) you are rewarded with a new unlockable. It's a sensible decision to try to keep people coming back, given exercise's reputation of putting people off.

The four categories are certainly varied, providing many different challenges. The muscle and yoga groups assign you an animated personal trainer (a disturbingly childish sounding man or a women with peculiar looking breasts) who instructs you on how to perform each exercise using the balance board; press-ups and stretches for the former, various yoga shapes for the latter. The game reacts to your performance and can tell when you're slacking off due to weight shifts in the board, and a sudden provoked anger in your trainer. At the end of the cycle you're allocated a score for your performance that you can use to improve in future, as well as compare against other users of your Wii. However, while the game tells you how to carry out each exercise, this is no substitute for actual yoga lessons, as I discovered when my girlfriend pointed out that not only did I look like a pillock, but I was doing 'the tree' in such a way that could do my spine some damage. My personal trainer was silent on this issue.

The other two areas are the most entertaining and are indulged in without the presence of a mammary-challenged trainer. Aerobic exercises work as a series of mini-games to get your heart rate going, and generally they succeed - especially with the added competitive element that high scores create. One of these involves spinning virtual hoola-hoops around as many times as you can within a time limit, while another allows you to go jogging through a virtual world with some other Miis (and some adorable Mii dogs). The latter doesn't actually use the balance board and measures your progress by the movements of the standard Wiimote either in your hand or pocket. The final category, balance, offers the most entertainment in its mini-game selection. As well as some of the activities that makes up the tests (shifting your balance so that a mark appears within two blue bars), there is a skiing game (shift your weight to speed up and navigate through markers), a tightrope-walking game (time your steps to stay balanced on a tightrope) and even a marble game, where you tilt a platform to drop marbles through a hole, not too far removed from Monkey Ball (and as a side note: SEGA, please make a Monkey Ball game for the balance board!) These are the ones you're most likely to come back to, time and time again, although they are also the ones less likely to get you fit. It seems that even Nintendo haven't mastered a way to make aerobic exercise fun.

Actually, the main way that Wii Fit affects you is not with the actual in-game exercises, but the mindset it instils within you. Because you've set yourself a target to hit in the game, you suddenly feel surprisingly guilty about doing things to break the programme, risking the disappointment from your balance board when you go for your daily weigh in. After watching Derby County vs Arsenal at the pub, I was dreading the following morning's test. Sure enough, you can feel the disappointment as the board gently asks you why you think you may have gained weight. Selecting the 'drank too much' option, the board greets you with a short lecture over why excessive drinking will cause weight gain, and you sheepishly promise to do better - even though the board guilts you into it by its passive-aggressive approach of demanding no such promise. Bastard.

Graphically, Wii Fit is a bit of a mixed bag. There's nothing appalling in there and the menus and Miis are as cutesy we've come to expect, but as touched upon earlier, the personal trainers have an indefinably creepy air to them, which isn't really in keeping with the game. That said, the animations make the instruction easy to understand in the yoga and muscle building sections, the testing takes on a sort of Brain Training/Big Brain Academy air to it, and the Mii-based mini-games are as visually appealing as ever. In particular, jogging around Nintendo's colourful island is a delight the first couple of times - almost enough to make you forget you're jogging on the spot and probably making the person in the flat below seethe with a level of repressed rage that will explode one day when you ask to borrow some sugar. Probably.

The sounds of Wii Fit are largely underwhelming. The menu music is the typical 'touch generations' mix of lifestyle music and the menu has all the pings and fades you'd expect when navigating. The personal trainers have both a male and female voice, but they suffer from the traditional game voice acting 'qualities' of sounding about as interested they would be reading the shipping forecast [The exception being Fran's friend from Black Books! Ed.] The one highlight in the sound effects is the Wii Fit board's 'voice', which you may find adorable or frustrating depending on your tolerance for the uber-cutesy. The board has been given the same sort of voice you'd expect to be given to a friendly pixie in a family game, and as such shouts out occasional lines (countdowns, "testing", etc.) and gives a mildly insulting yelp when you step on it for the first time. It would be nice if Nintendo had included an option to work out to your own soundtrack via the SDcard, though I couldn't see an option for this anywhere.

When judging Wii Fit overall, you're very conscious of the fact that it doesn't achieve anything for its users that couldn't be managed with a little willpower. Worse still, the most entertaining 'games' in the package are the ones that improve balance rather than promote weight loss or muscle tone, which potentially damage its 'good for you' fun credentials further. With that said, it's true that any exercise is better than nothing, and spending some of your usual sofa-bound game time on your feet and moving around cannot be a bad thing. Wii Fit's biggest triumph though is that it keeps you conscious of your fitness goals at all times - sure, you could have another pint, but are you really ready to face the disappointment of the cutesy white board? I'm certainly not.

Reviewed by Alan Martin for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).