At the time of the Nintendo DS launch, Core Gaming undertook to follow Europe’s line-up which meant that South African gamers would get their games at the same time as Europe. Core Gaming has delivered and Wii Fit will hit South African shelves just 10 days after Europeans get to test their Wii fitness and nineteen days before the game lands on North American shores.

Core Gaming held the launch of Wii Fit earlier this morning in Johannesburg. This highly anticipated exercise game will launch on the 5th of May across South Africa, and the good news is that it will sport a competitive price tag of R999.

Once again Core Gaming pulled out all of the stops to ensure a slick launch of yet another innovative Nintendo product. With seven Wiis set up with Wii Fit as well as staff on hand to introduce this new game and demonstrate how it’s done, there really was no excuse not to jump right into the action, and that is exactly what we did. Make sure you don’t miss out on El33tonline’s review of Wii Fit and pictures of the launch which will follow shortly.

South African console figures

And then it was on to the Media Briefing. Matthew Grose, General Manager of Core Gaming Systems, gave a brief rundown of how the Wii has performed to date in South Africa. If you cast your mind back to our coverage of the re-launch of the Nintendo DS in South Africa earlier this year, you may remember that the best performing next generation console for Quarter 4 of 2007 was the Wii which boasted 46% of the market, followed by the Xbox 360 with 29% and the PS3 with 25%.

Turning to the period including January and February 2008, the latest figures show that the Wiis footing in the South African market has become steadier. It now leads the next-generation console race with 54%, followed by the PS3 with 24% and the Xbox 360 with 23%. Overall the next generation has increased its lead on the previous generation, results from January and February 2008 list the next generation as the leader with 57% of home consoles in comparison to previous generations 43%.

For those of you still wondering, given that the Nintendo DS has only been on the market for 6 weeks in South Africa it is still to early for sales figures to be released but they will hit the wires in the not too distant future.

Fitness and fun for everyone

Grose reiterated Nintendo’s aim to incorporate current, lapsed and non-gamers into their target market by seeking to reinvent the relationship between the gamer and the game. It seems as if Wii Fit has done exactly this. Wii Fit is about ‘fitness and fun for everyone’ according to Matthew Grose. It is “a breakthrough product in the Wii range, bringing with it an unprecedented level of body-awareness to gaming.”

Wii Fit fuses video gaming with exercise in a unique and fun way. What began as Shigeru Miyamoto’s (Senior Managing Director, Nintendo Co.) fascination with his own scale has now turned into a phenomenon. Nintendo saw the project in a serious light and had a number of prototypes before settling on the Wii Balance Board as we see it today. Wii Fit sees players exercising using the weight and motion sensing Wii Balance Board.

The game includes four training categories: aerobic exercises, muscle workouts, yoga and balance games. These categories are aimed to develop your bodily balance control ability, help tone and condition muscles, burn fat in the body and help increase aerobic stamina. In addition there are more than 40 different activities within the training categories including Hula Hoop, Ski Jump, Press-Up Challenge, Rhythm Boxing, Rowing Squat and Lunge. There are even classic Yoga poses such as Half Moon, Tree and Crocodile Twist.

Wii Balance Board

The game combines fitness with fun as the whole family can participate in daily exercises. Wii Fit comes bundled with the Wii Balance Board, a new accessory developed exclusively for the Wii. The Wii Balance Board is a pressure sensitive, wireless board that gets placed on the floor in front of the TV. It senses a players weight as well as shift in balance in every direction so when you step on to it during activities, you can imitate on-screen movements. The Wii Balance Board will also be compatible with other titles in the future including Namco Bandai’s Family Ski.

Wii Fit was designed to increase player’s awareness of how important fitness is everyday. Increase it and make it easier at the same time. The game also features an on-screen fitness trainer who will change his or her verbal instructions depending on how well players perform the activity. Wii Fit combines an accessible and intuitive training programme with helpful tutorials and the Wii Fit Channel to help you on the way to a healthier lifestyle, but perhaps more importantly, to do all this having fun.

The Wii Fit Channel enables up to eight players to track their fitness progress. After popping the Wii Fit disc in, a new Wii Fit Channel will be added to your Wii Menu. Once this new channel is added, players will not have to insert the Wii Fit disc to use the Wii Balance Board to measure your weight and calculate your BMI, measure the center of your bodily balance and conduct a balance test to calculate your Wii Fit Age. The channel can also be used to monitor how long you spend on each category of exercise in one day. The game also boasts a feature where players can account for daily exercise routines such as running, shopping and even washing up.

How’s the game shaping up globally?

Wii Fit is currently only available in Japan, and despite the game hitting shelves on the 1st of December in the land of the rising sun it is still keeping up the pace against its competitors. Wii Fit sold a massive 261 226 copies in its first week on sale in Japan and has regularly topped the Japanese software charts since then. It still makes a regular appearance in the Top 10 software titles in Japan and this past week (for the period 7/4 – 13/4) it earned fourth place with 31 000 copies sold. What is also interesting to note is that Wii Fit’s life-to-date sales in Japan currently stand at 1.86 million copies and that the title took just seven weeks to reach one million sales in Japan.

Wii Fit will be released across North America on the 19th of May and will race onto European shelves on the 25th of April. With reports of most European shops sold out of stock due to the high number of pre-orders for the game, it is good to see this great title landing here too. Given the popularity of the title, my advice would be to get a copy of the game as soon as possible because these babies are sure to fly off the shelves faster than Bowser could steal Princess Peach in the Mushroom Kingdom.