14 DAY TRIAL // Reggie Fils-Aime, the man who heads up Nintendo of America, has announced that Wii Fit Plus is set to be released on October 4 in the United States. The game will be packaged with a Balance Board and will be retailing for a suggested 100-dollar price.
The announcement came at a conference that GameStop organized in Las Vegas. Those who already own a Balance Board and have used it to play the original game in the series can only pick up the standalone game disk that is set to sell for just 20 dollars, basically guaranteeing that players of the first game will pick up Wii Fit Plus for the new activities.
Wii Fit Plus is set to enhance the way people approach videogame-based fitness (there's a contradictory concept if there ever was one) by adding some more mini games, some of them pretty innovative, and by refining the way the game communicates to the player their progress and what they have to do to become more in shape.
It's interesting to see how Nintendo has borrowed heavily from other genres for the mini games revealed. There's one called Snowball Fight and plays like a stripped down first person shooter but does little to create fitness, and another, called Obstacle Course, which is probably inspired by Mario Kart, with players running and jumping to get over obstacles while avoiding swinging balls.
Wii Fit was a huge hit for Nintendo and managed to pretty much single handedly create a new gaming genre on the Nintendo Wii, with Electronic Arts also making a splash with EA Sports Active. With Sony preparing to release a motion tracking wand and with Project Natal coming to the Xbox 360, don't be surprised to see fitness gaming becoming even more prevalent than it is now.