Thanks to the success of games such as Wii Fit, EA Sports Active and Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2009, the medical community is starting to take games seriously as a means to pump you up keep us healthy. Reuters reports that at this year's fifth annual Games for Health Conference in Boston, a bolstered attendance brought health experts together to talk about these games, and you'd be surprised how much money these titles generated last year.

"Healthcare is 18 percent of the GDP of the United States and so games for health is probably the largest sector of activity in the serious games field long-term," said Ben Sawyer, a co-founder of The Games for Health Project. He added, "If you add up the 18 month sales of Wii Fit and the sales of EA Sports Active, Konami's Dance Dance Revolution and other healthy games, the worldwide retail numbers are over $2 billion." That's not a bad slice of the $22 billion pie that gaming lovingly prepared last year, if we may say so.

Some experts think the government should look into offering these types of games in schools to help kids learn the importance of exercise, while others think that a public service campaign should be started and backed by the president, Congress, and other federal agencies. We'd comment, but we really only play Wii Fit for the hulahoop game.

EA Sports was very happy to announce today that it's Wii fitness bundle EA Sports Active had a tremendously successful start, selling over 600,000 copies since its May 19 release. In case you were wondering why EA was so quick to put out an expansion, yeah, that's why. It's not like the company desperately wants you to lose those love handles, you know.

Apparently, Mrs. Michaels' last Ultimatum wasn't ultimate enough -- a recent Majesco press release dropped an announcement that the Biggest Loser star would be featured in two new games this year: Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum 2010 and Jillian Michaels' Pocket Trainer 2010. Man, we don't want to be rude or anything, but this couldn't have come at a better time. Our pockets have seriously let themselves go.

Both games are set to drop this fall, and will likely each be purchased 500,000 times.

While Wii Fit never really felt like it could replace the gym experience entirely, EA Sports Active actually does feel like it offers an approximation -- and they did it simply by including a piece of rubber. Amazing, right? We took the new personal trainer for a spin yesterday, and while we don't know if this will give us a Charles Atlas body right away, it definitely felt like a substantial workout.

Go on, "break" a sweat in our review ... behind the break. Sadly, bad puns do not burn any calories whatsoever.

You've already seen what comes in the box, now watch what the Balance Board adds to EA Sports Active. Using the fitness-focused peripheral, players can lunge to hit tennis balls, skate on one foot and dance the night away, all in the name of exergaming. Of course, use of the peripheral is optional but this trailer recommends adding it to your daily routine and the game's 30 Day Challenge (aka, the Career Mode) to "broaden" Active's variety.

To recap: EA Sports Active makes use of a leg strap, resistance band, the Wii-mote, nunchuck and (optional) Balance Board. We presume EA is looking to break some kind of Guinness World Record for most peripherals used by a player, at once. We can't wait for Active's next add-on to be revealed -- a spandex leotard that measures the player's heart rate and reduces their self-respect.

Some New York city schools are testing a new program for physical education, one that utilizes Nintendo's popular Wii Fit package. Trading in dodge balls for Balance Boards, several different schools received free bundles from Nintendo, but Lori Rose Benson, head of the Department of Education's Office of Fitness and Health Education, admits she wasn't on board at first. It didn't take her long to get with the program, however, as she realized that "students learn in lots of different ways and that we can engage students in physical activity through gaming and through interactive techniques," which is really what's important. Well, that and making sure you block all of those soccer balls.

If you're anything like us, you've been staring ruefully at your gut thinking, "Just you wait until EA Sports Active comes out Mr. Tumnus, then we'll see who's the boss!" Meanwhile, your belly's remembering similar conversations before the release of Wii Fit and My Fitness Coach and sporting as much of a smile as stomachs can manage, which is really more of a smirk.

Now, thanks to the game's official site, we've got a full list of actual sports contained within the game to help you give your tummy threats a little more impact, including "Squat Jump, Fast Dance and Punch Bag," which (assuming the rules haven't changed from our days at St. Victoria's School for Troubled Boys) has us hoping for an included Wii Cup. Check out the full list of activities after the break.

Michael Torchia, "fitness expert" and host of the upcoming AM talk radio show "Shape Up, America," has announced plans for a class-action lawsuit against Nintendo, claiming that people are injuring themselves playing Wii games. Torchia says that many players injure themselves on the Wii because Nintendo has not properly warned consumers that warming up is necessary before exercise.

Torchia's press release claims that the proliferation of Wii Fit has led to players sustaining "injuries in their knees, back and wrists because of overuse and improper warm- up."

In addition, Torchia claims that Nintendo is misrepresenting the Wii's effectiveness as an exercise tool. " ... Nintendo is contributing to the epidemic of obesity. Young and old are putting away their gym clothes and shying away from going outdoors to play sports, because the addictive appeal to the Wii game products." In Torchia's estimation, then, Wii games are both poor exercise and excessively strenuous exercise. Like eating a pizza tied to the back of a moving car!

[Via What They Play]

Siliconera's Spencer noticed a trademark in the European trademark database, filed on January 8, for something called "Nintendo Active Health". He correctly eliminated Nintendo's DS walking game Personal Trainer: Walking, which is called Walk With Me: Do you know your walking routine? in Europe.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with the problem of what Nintendo Active Health is. It could be an upcoming fitness-based game, perhaps a sequel to Wii Fit; or maybe something with more of an emphasis on other health-related topics besides exercise, like eating habits. Or it could just be an abandoned name for Wii Fit (like "Health Pack") that Nintendo didn't want anyone else using. Less likely, it could be some kind of hardware warranty program, for the health of your console!


[Via Joystiq]

If you're going to try to sell a fitness item to people, you might as well use the marketing methods employed by other fitness items. At least, that's the philosophy seemingly behind this new trailer for EA Sports Active, which would be right at home in the late-night Paid Programming television block.

Bob Greene, whom you might know from his work with Oprah, demonstrates the fitness title in much the same way as we could imagine, say, Chuck Norris and Christie Brinkley, or Fitness Celebrity John Basedow doing. Except, rather than the spaces between segments of HGTV shows, these trailers are going to end up being shown mostly on gaming websites like this one, to people who probably wouldn't be receptive of the advertising even if we did like the game (which we kind of do!)

You can file this one in the "almost too good to be true" pile -- in fact, while you read this post, we advise repeatedly pinching yourself. If you're a Brit searching for a copy of Wii Fit in time for Christmas, you'll already know that nowhere has it. As we see it, you have three options:

• You can buy your loved ones something that isn't Wii Fit and ruin Christmas for everybody like a big jerk.
• You can fork out obscene amounts of cash for a copy from some eBay scalper who bought the last 25 units at GameStation in November.
  
• You can visit BuyItPlayIt this Friday and press F5 a lot. The site has a big old pile of Wii Fits that will be on sale from 1:00pm GMT, with the first fifty going for the unbelievable price of £50 (in probably less than fifty seconds). That's £20 lower than the standard price. We are quite certain that the site could charge twice that and clear its inventory in minutes, but there you go.
  

We've never used BuyItPlayIt ourselves, incidentally, so can't pass comment on its standard of service. Have any readers shopped there before?


[Via press release]

Chris Kohler attended the launch event of some Warcraft game at a San Francisco branch of GameStop last night, and ended up discussing the state of Wii availability this holiday season with a company executive.

To the relief of parents up and down the land, the suit echoed GameStop's assurances from September, revealing that there should be enough Nin-Tend-O Magic Motion Boxes to go round until the first week of December. As Kohler points out, that date means GameStop has enough consoles to last beyond Black Friday, a small miracle. That's still not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot better than the last two years. Alas, the executive called Wii Fit a "different story"; maybe it's time to check out some alternatives.

We picked up Nintendo's wildly popular digital personal trainer, Wii Fit, shortly after launch with hopes to transform ourselves into Hasslehoffian dreamboats -- sadly, we found the Balance Board's unflinching critique of our porcine physiques far too traumatizing. Fortunately, according to an article in the latest issue of Men's Fitness, Electronic Arts is hard at work on their own fitness title for the Wii -- one that will use a brand new (and hopefully less judgmental) peripheral.

This isn't the first we've heard of EA's answer to Wii Fit -- though details on the new peripheral (and the apparent eschewing of the game's use of the Balance Board) is news to us. According to the magazine's interview with EA executive producer Dave McCarthy, the aforementioned peripheral will allow players to attach the Wiimote to their body, where it will measure their movements during a series of in-game exercises. No details on a release schedule for the game, or its capacity to make us openly weep, were mentioned.

The latest Men's Fitness magazine had an interesting story about fitness and gaming (something we call "exergaming"). Apparently, EA is working on their own Wii Fit knock-off (remember, we heard about this months ago?), complete with their own peripheral. The article states that the new game will fall under the "All-Play" brand, which is the family-friendly label they use for the Wii. This new peripheral will somehow allow players to attach the Wiimote to their body, measuring how instense they run, squat and do a variety of other exercises, says EA's executive producer Dave McCarthy.

We're not subscribers to Men's Fitness, to be honest, so we don't have the article to confirm any of this, so we're marking it as a rumor. If anybody wants to send us a pic or a scan, please, feel free. We'll be sure to update the post here.

Remember that weird pedometer trademark that came up recently? Well, instead of being something tied to a Wii game, as many thought, it's tied to a DS title instead. During the video presentation showing off upcoming DS titles, the image to the right was shown.

We're having a hard time translating the name, so we're just going to call it Lifestyle Rhythm DS for the moment. As you might have guessed, based on the image to the right, this is scheduled for a November release in Japan.

Hit up Nintendo's Japanese site for a closer look at the upcoming game.

[Thanks, Sonic_13!]