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.