To get the full Wii experience, you will want to pick up the Wii Fit Balance Board. I tried it for the first time this past weekend, and I really liked it.  Besides zany minigames like Hula Hoop, Wii Fit focuses on nuanced movement with balance and yoga exercises.

The mood of these new Nintendo products is a step into the future. The clean white designs and gentle prompts are like some 2001: Space Oddessy vision of how we will someday exercise in our space pods.

When I was in 4th grade, my teacher turned me into a slave for gold-star stickers.  I was skipping recess and cleaning the overhead projector for those stickers. Skipping recess, dude. Nintendo pulls some similar psychological tricks to incite your gold-sticker addiction. But they employ these nefarious tactics to remind you not to skip recess.

Wii Fit encourages you to play for short periods every day. You get a stamp on the calendar when you finish your daily activities, and a chart to show your progress. The drive to get today’s stamp is just enough to overcome the inertia that kills most exercise plans within the first week.

The balance board accessory is a really nice-looking and sturdy machine. Most of the ones available on Taobao come with the Wii Fit game disc in traditional Chinese. But you should have a local shop that will be able to provide English editions of this and most other games. Accessory compatibility is not a problem on the Wii, and this Balance Board will be compatible with the Wii console we wrote about earlier.

Get Wii Fit on Taobao - 658rmb

The Wii is Cheap and Awesome

So what special considerations do we need to take when buying a Wii in China? Since China is not an official Wii market, the ones on sale here are a mix of imports from other regions. That means that the ones for sale here are unlocked – firmware scrubbed – to accept a wide variety of discs.

Make sure you get an English-ready model

The thing you need to avoid here is a Wii that was made for the Japanese market, because it will likely be in Japanese. When looking on Taobao, make sure to keep English 英文in your searches.

Get a Nintendo Wii on Taobao – 1500rmb

Word on the street is that this new thing – Wii Motion Plus – is the real deal. It adds a lot of accuracy to what the Wii’s motion detectors can pick up. Right now, people are saying that the new Tiger Woods game is great for demonstrating what this new technology can do. Golf was my favorite Wii Sport, so I am pretty pumped for it. Wii Motion Plus – 200rmb

Check out all of our Wii-related posts.