Last month I mentioned Yourself!Fitness as an example of an exergame that developers should definitely refer to when creating a dedicated fitness title for the Wii. It seems that Ubisoft were meant to be doing just that but have now found themselves at the wrong end of a $26 million lawsuit as a result.

Up until now, ResponDesign has pretty much lead the way in the exergaming genre with Yourself!Fitness which it released in 2004 for PS2 and PC. In 2006 the company began developing a follow-up title for next-gen consoles (including Wii), titled Fitness Lifestyle. In early 2007 ResponDesign began negotiations with Ubisoft with the aim of licensing Yourself!Fitness and the Fitness Lifestyle code and all of the related game assets to Ubisoft which was to develop, publish and market a new Wii title called My Fitness Coach.

The agreement was signed in August 2007 and according to ResponDesign, Ubisoft received all of the required game assets and committed to delivering a "playable" first version of the game in November 2007. The aim was to start marketing in December 2007 for an April 2008 launch, which would have put the game in direct competition with Wii Fit. (Bear in mind that I have yet to ascertain whether or not there was ever any intention by ResponDesign or Ubisoft to include Wii Balance Board support but it just seems illogical not to.)

Clearly none of this happened and as of August 2008, we have yet to see any mention of a Wii fitness title from Ubisoft. According to ResponDesign, the release date for the agreed title is now Q1 2009, almost a year after it was originally intended to be released, and understandably, ResponDesign are not happy. Not only did Ubisoft miss the boat in terms of benefitting from the increased awareness of exergaming generated by the launch of Wii Fit, but ResponDesign feels it has missed out on millions of dollars worth of royalties for a game which never materialised. You have got to wonder why Ubisoft would miss out on an opportunity like this. Were they perhaps afraid to incur the wrath of Nintendo by releasing a competitor to Wii Fit or was there more to it than that? According to ResponDesign's claim there was.

In February this year, Ubisoft announced the release of a DS title called "My Weight Loss Coach" which was to include customised coaching sessions based on skill level, personalised profiles and objective setting, a success based rewards system and nutritional coaching. All of these features were critical components of Yourself!Fitness and Fitness Lifestyle and so according to ResponDesign were subject to the original license agreement for My Fitness Coach which was never intended for release on DS.

As this stage we have yet to see any kind of response to these allegations from Ubisoft but this will no doubt turn into another drawn out court case where only the lawyers win. And while all this is going on, it's ultimately us, the consumer, losing out. As a fitness title, Wii Fit can only go so far and as users begin to tire of the game and look for more fully featured exergaming titles, My Fitness Coach could have been the perfect solution.

It's not all bad news however as ResponDesign CEO Ted Spooner had this to say:

"The Wii Balance Board is a great peripheral and we are considering utilizing it in our future development. Wii Fit has been a great validation of the fitness category that we pioneered. It has shown there is tremendous pent up demand for content for this audience."

Let's hope that as the lawyers battle this lawsuit, ResponDesign continues to forge ahead and bring us the Wii exergaming titles we really want.

Ok, maybe I stretched the facts a little bit. Xbox VP David Gosen didn't exactly call the Wii Balance Board a gimmick in so many words but he certainly implied it in a recent interview with develop magazine. When asked about Microsoft's peripheral strategy here's what he had to say:

"What Nintendo have done with the Wii is truly fantastic – there is no question about it. But I think sometimes there is a thin line between gimmick and great gameplay. We've seen some research that says 60 per cent of people who bought a Wii Fit play it once and don't play it again. ...We have to ensure that the peripheral strategy that anyone employs makes sense and delivers a truly game changing experience. Because if it's just 'okay' it will end up in the cupboard under the stairs."

Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive but in my view, I think it's clear what he's implying there. As for the "research" he's referring to, that sounds a lot like the original IT Media poll in Japan which doesn't necessarily reflect what's going on in the rest of the world today, especially if our survey is anything to go by which shows that 56% of Wii Fit owners use it every day.

I don't see the Wii Fit game as a measure of the success or failure of the Wii Balance Board as a peripheral. Yes there are lots of balance boards gathering dust but that's not because it's a gimmicky peripheral. It's because people have gotten bored or frustrated with Wii Fit, and I'm pretty sure that if there were more balance board compatible games available, those Wiiboards would be well used.

You can read David Gosen's full interview here.

On my daily scour of the web for all things Balance Board I came across a blog post titled "Wii Fit Can Cause Eating Disorders". In itself this is nothing new - we've been bombarded by the press with similar stories since Wii Fit's launch. But a few things in this post by Aussie Pete did grab my attention.

Firstly, he quotes a response from Nintendo regarding the accuracy of BMI in relation to younger age groups. Now I've seen a few of these reponses before, but this is the first time I've seen a response from Nintendo that shifts the responsibility to parents.

"Parents who are concerned that their children will react negatively to one of the four BMI categories should use Wii Fit in such a way that the BMI tracker does not appear on screen."

While I do understand the intent I'm not sure how workable it is in practice. As a parent you may have control in your own home, but how do you stop your child from being introduced to Wii Fit outside the home as in the now well publicised case reported in the UK's Daily Mail. Fortunately it seems that common sense has prevailed and overall the response to Wii Fit continues to be positive.

The other thing that grabbed my attention was the image above which so succinctly sums up one of the problems with BMI. Incidentally, this image comes from an article on BMI at HowStuffWorks. If you're interested to read more on BMI, how it's calculated and the various pros and cons of BMI, this article is a good read.

Technophile readers will know that Wii Fit is only one of a number of exergaming products on the market today. In fact exergaming as a concept has been around for over 25 years. For a good read on exergaming check out From Atari Joyboard to Wii Fit on BoingBoing.

One of the products listed in that article is Yourself!Fitness. Released in 2004, this exergame developed by Respondesign for Xbox, PS2 and PC is currently Wii Fit's closest competition and they know it, promoting the title online with the tag "Before Wii Fit there was Yourself Fitness". The game has received a great deal of positive press and by all accounts, it really does work. In many respects it is far better than Wii Fit but it does have one major drawback – Y!F does not provide real-time feedback.

Like Wii Fit, Y!F has an onscreen trainer who guides you through the various activities but since there are no motion/weight-sensitive controllers, the game relies on asking the user for feedback on how they feel they are performing and then adjusts the workout accordingly.

This is obviously where Wii Fit has a distinct advantage over Y!F and why, moving forward, the Wii platform will lead the way in exergaming. Y!F users would no doubt look at Wii Fit and say that it's more game than true fitness and they would be right but I don't think it's fair to compare the two games in that way. As I've said in previous posts, Wii Fit was never intended to be the ultimate fitness title. I see Wii Fit as more of a proof of concept of what could be done on the Wii platform with the introduction of the Wii Balance Board and now it's up to third-party developers to run with it.

We know that EA are considering a fitness title and that Majesco will be releasing Jillian Michaels' Fitness Ultimatum - let's just hope that they learn from games like Yourself!Fitness and give us the exergames we really want.

For a more in-depth comparison of Wii Fit and Yourself!Fitness check out GameSpy.

Clearly these Aussies have too much time on their hands - but they're pretty adept at Photoshop. Since there's not too much happening right now in the world of balance board, here's a Friday Funny courtesy of gameplayer.

For the most part, their list of "7 Balance Board games they should make..." is pure sillyness with titles like Loungeroom Luge, Word to your mother breakdancing and my personal favourite, Tom Hanks’ Pro Skater 2, with the tagline "Because Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam sold, and it was utter BALLS".

But Marty McFly Hoverboarding - that could actually fly (excuse the pun). Now I enjoyed the Back to the Future Trilogy but I wouldn't necessarily want to go to Hill Valley 2015 to play the game but just the concept of hoverboarding could work. So come on EA/Ubisoft, we know you've got your hands full with skating/snowboarding but surely it's not a massive jump to hoverboarding?

The American Council on Exercise (ACE) has just released its findings on a study investigating the potential fitness benefits of Wii Sports. Unfortunately this study was completed before the launch of Wii Fit, but the good news is that ACE are now busy with a similar study examining Wii Fit.

While the findings of the current report are not earth-shattering (playing Wii Sports IS better for you than sitting on the couch), they do make for some interesting reading. More importantly however, the study, conducted at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Exercise and Health Program, seemed, in my view to be very well thought out and extremely scientific so we should be able to look forward to an accurate assessment of Wii Fit in the coming months.

You can read the official press release and download the results of the study from www.acefitness.org.

Now that E3 is over for another year, it's Europe's turn as we get ready for Games Convention 2008 in Leipzig from the 20 - 24 August. The European divisions of all the major players will be there (EA, Ubisoft) although strangely, Nintendo doesn't appear on the preliminary exhibitor list (download PDF).

One company that does however appear is JoWood Productions. We were hoping to find out a bit more about their Wii Yoga balance board title at E3 but unfortunately they were a no-show. Let's see if they deliver the goods this time.

For all the info on GC 2008 visit www.gc-germany.com.

GameDaily has just published an interview with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata. They were lucky enough to get some one-on-one time with him at E3 last week and discussed several topics and touched briefly on the whole supply and demand issue. Here's what he had to say:

"In the spring of this year, we announced that starting from this summer (2008) we would have a monthly maximum production capacity for Wii of 2.4 million, and we are working with that schedule right now. We are [continuing] to increase the maximum production capability... However, the expansion of the market for potential customers, the number of people who are waiting to purchase Wii, is beyond our expectations right now. So for the time being, I really do not think that the imbalance for supply and demand can be solved immediately. For example, when we look back at the whole history of video games, in the past it was unthinkable that other than during the November – December time period we would have 700,000 monthly unit sales in U.S. alone."

Now I understand that he's referring here to the Wii console itself and not Wii Fit, but his comments do give us some insight into the way in which Nintendo handles it's production so here's my bit of speculation. For Wii Fit, they would have estimated launch sales based on past Wii sales to set a target (difficult considering that Wii Fit opened up an entirely new market) and then set their monthly production figures. Clearly they underestimated that figure and now need to ramp up production but that doesn't happen overnight. In the meantime they have to rotate distribution globally with the stock they do have which means that different regions are going to experience shortages at different times. That would explain why, for example, Wii Fit dropped off the UK sales charts for three weeks at the end of May / beginning June - just as launch sales would have ramped up following Wii Fit's release in the US. It all sounds logical but it's no consolation to those of you who still can't get your hands on one.

The UK's Telegraph has published an article claiming that Wii Fit may be sold out by Christmas. If the desperate emails we get from readers are anything to go by, then never mind Christmas, for the vast majority of people, Wii Fit is sold out now.

While this kind of scaremongering only helps to feed the frenzy, it may unfortunately prove to be true. The article quotes a spokesperson for one of the UK's largest electrical retailers who says, "If we get 1,000 in on Thursday or Friday they are all gone by Sunday. We comfortably sell out of our allocation".

Meanwhile the debate goes on with regards to why there's an ongoing shortage of stock. Is it simply a case of demand outstripping supply? And just how much is the average consumer being cheated by the whole buy and resell at a profit on eBay market?

You'd have thought that Nintendo would have learnt a lesson from the Wii console launch and ensured that there was more than enough stock this time around. But the conspiracy theorists among you will say that in fact the artificial shortage of the console actually worked in Nintendo's favour and now they’re simply doing the same with Wii Fit. You've got to love a good conspiracy.

Update: It seems that all this doom and gloom in the papers about stock shortages got the attention of Nintendo who responded to MCV in an attempt to reassure the public.

As for the whole conspiracy theory thing, this blog post received (if the associated email address is to be believed) a comment from Nintendo.com confirming 'intentional shortage'. I'm sorry, call me naïve, but I don't believe a word of it so nice try whoever you were. The fact is that when there's limited supply of something, a company will move that stock to where it makes most financial sense - surely that's not 'intentional shortage', that's business strategy? As to why Nintendo doesn't seem to be able to cope with demand, only Nintendo knows the real answer and anything other than that is simply speculation.

Responses to the Wii Fit Survey have been coming in steadily and while it's still too soon to draw any objective conclusions, the response to Wii Fit and the Wii Balance Board has been overwhelmingly positive. As expected, considering that Wii Fit has only been available for 2 to 3 months worldwide, and despite some valid gripes about the game, we've seen very little drop-off in usage in our survey. No doubt over time we will start to see some drop-off but if the feedback we’ve been getting is anything to go by, the balance board itself should go from strength to strength.

Incidentally, 22% of Wii Fit users polled thus far have bought another balance board compatible game which is not bad when you consider that the only other game available right now is We Ski/Family Ski. This is another figure which is certain to increase over the coming months and will continue to do so as long as developers like Ubisoft and Electronic Arts remain committed to the balance board. I only hope that the Wiiboard isn't overshadowed by Wii MotionPlus.

We've also been getting some really great feedback on Wii Fit and some excellent suggestions on how it could be improved. One of the most common complaints, certainly from an exercise point of view, was the disjointedness of the various activities and the time it takes to move from one to the other. Ideally, users would like to have the ability to create a personalised exercise routine by stringing together a number of different activities and then performing them without interruption. Sounds like a good idea to me. We now know (or at least hope) that EA is working on a dedicated fitness title so let's hope that this is the kind of thing they take into consideration.

PS - If you haven't already, do please take a moment to give us your feedback on Wii Fit and help us to get the word out about the Wii Fit Balance Board Survey.