'Wii Fit' exercises serious role

— -- The creative energy of the video game industry descended on San Francisco this week for the annual Game Developers Conference.Here are highlights of the gathering, which ends today.

Nintendo's Takao Sawano, who helped Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto design the upcoming Wii Fit, offered insights about the groundbreaking personal fitness program for the Wii system.

He said Miyamoto, who had taken particular interest in his well-being as the Wii was being developed, told him: "I have fun just weighing myself and collecting weight data. So this idea is bound to lead to something interesting."

Sawano expanded an early bathroom scale-like prototype attachment into a multi-sensored board after learning that sumo wrestlers weighed so much that they needed to have each foot on a different scale.

The fitness program has four components: yoga, strength training, aerobics and balance games. Each area has six to 10 activities. In addition to using the board to balance on and do push-ups against, Wii Fit lets you run in place (not on the board) using the Wii Remote "like a pedometer," says Nintendo's Reggie Fils-Aime. "It's not a game, it's a tool to help a broad audience to get fit. That's what drove development."

Wii Fit, due May 19, will cost less than $100, Fils-Aime says. In Japan, where it costs about $84, Wii Fit has sold more than 1.4 million copies in two months.

Weird tales.

If you think Shrek wreaked havoc on the Disneyized version of classic fairy tales, wait till you see American McGee's Grimm. The former id Software designer and programmer (Doom, Quake) re-envisioned the Alice in Wonderland story in his 2000 computer game American McGee's Alice. Now, at his Spicy Horse studio in Shanghai, he's finishing a series of 24 episodic games, each an individual story from Little Red Riding Hood to Cinderella. "With fairy tales, the version that has been adapted by Disney is nowhere near close to what it originally was. Pinocchio kills the character that is Jiminy Cricket. He has a part in other murders and mutilations. He is a very evil character."