By Loveday Morris

July 3 (Bloomberg) -- Game Group Plc, the U.K.'s largest video-games retailer, said sales growth accelerated in the second quarter as new releases including Nintendo Co.'s ``Wii Fit'' and ``Grand Theft Auto IV'' boosted revenue.

Sales at stores open at least a year rose 25 percent in the 22 weeks ended June 28, the company said today, faster than the 20 percent gain it reported for the first 13 weeks of the period. First half pretax profit will surge to at least 33 million pounds ($65.7 million) from 2.7 million pounds a year before, Game said.

Game Group fell 4.2 percent in London trading as some analysts said sales can't get any better. Releases including Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.'s ``Grand Theft Auto IV'' and ``Wii Fit'' went on sale in April, drawing shoppers even as higher fuel and food costs weigh on disposable incomes.

``Despite this continuing strong performance, the current gaming cycle is going to peak at some point, as it has done with previous console generations,'' Landsbanki Securities analyst Mark Photiades wrote in a note. ``The current cycle has been extended by the number of consoles available, and because the Nintendo Wii has attracted substantial numbers of non-core gamers to the market.'' Photiades has a ``reduce'' rating on the stock.

Game dropped 11 pence to 251.25 pence in London. The stock is little changed this year, the second-best performance in the 19-member FTSE 350 General Retailers Index, which has declined 41 percent.

Xbox, PlayStation 3

``People are increasingly starting to look toward the down cycle,'' said Numis Securities analyst Andrew Wade. ``As we move toward the down cycle, the stock will gradually be de-rated.''

Take-Two has said consumers purchased 8.5 million ``Grand Theft Auto IV'' units worldwide from the April 29 release through May 31, helping U.S. video-game sales gain 41 percent in the month.

Same-store sales in the U.K. and Ireland climbed 28 percent in the 22 weeks, while revenue at international stores open at least a year rose 17 percent, Game said. Growth was slower outside the U.K. because of an ``insufficient'' supply of Nintendo products, particularly in Spain, the retailer said.

Software sales are increasing while demand for consoles including the Wii, Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox and Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 continues, Game said. Rising sales of games, which are more lucrative than consoles, will help the gross margin to widen by between 0.5 and 1 percentage point this year, Game said.

`Brain Training'

``The bears keep expecting Game's fantastic sales growth to slow down, but it never does,'' Pali International Ltd. analyst Nick Bubb, who doesn't rate the stock, wrote in a June 30 note.

Video games have moved beyond the stereotypical audience of teenage males to become a mainstream product, aided in particular by Nitendo's Wii and DS Lite, the company says. Games developed for the DS Lite include ``Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training,'' a series of tests and puzzles intended to stimulate the brain.

News source:  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=aDRS0BE0Dl50&refer=uk

At the 2008 Game Developers Conference in February, Nintendo announced that Wii Fit would launch on May 19. The Japanese game giant's proclamation led many gamers, technophiles, and health enthusiasts to mark their calendars under the assumption they could get their hands on the $90 balance-board based, exercise-centric title on the third Monday of the month.

One of the few people who bought a Wii Fit in NYC today.

However, confusion began to erupt when Nintendo's nationwide advertising campaign for Wii Fit began touting the game as going on sale on Wednesday, May 21. When queried by GameSpot last week, a representative for Nintendo of America insisted the game would go on sale on May 19. "It may take a few days for shipments to reach every part of the country and the ads you saw may have considered that," said the rep.

Today, Nintendo is holding a Wii Fit launch event in New York City, where it sold the game to a select few. The rest of the country won't be as fortunate. Nintendo made a last-minute announcement today that the May 19 date only applies to only one location--the Nintendo World Store in New York City. According to a "Nintendo World ambassador" manning the phones at the store, the game sold out there in under an hour this morning. However, subsequent reports received by GameSpot say the game was in stock for several hours. A call made to the Nintendo World Store at 3pm EDT/12pm PDT confirmed there were no more units for sale.

Calls to more than a dozen other retailers throughout the country--including ones just blocks away from the Nintendo World Store--produced an uniform result. "The game doesn't come out until Wednesday," was the oft-repeated reply from more than 20 clerks and managers at GameStop, Best Buy, and Target locations on both coasts and in the Midwest. One GameStop employee in San Francisco seemed particularly glum, saying, "We won't even know if we are getting any quantity until Wednesday."

GameSpot queried Nintendo reps about the confusion surrounding the Wii Fit launch, as well as the prospect of shortages--shortages which apparently have led to online retailers such as Amazon ceasing to offer preorders. As of press time, no reply had been received.

For more on Wii Fit, which is already on sale in Europe, Australasia, and Japan--where it has sold 1 million units--check out GameSpot's full review. To learn more about the actual health effects of the game, check out GameSpot editors' collective Wii Fit blog, which will launch later this week.

Grand Theft Auto IV may be hitting all the headlines, but in the UK at least, Wii Fit is putting up a fight with Rockstar's crime sim for chart domination. There has been some discussion over whether it can actually be called a game, especially since Nintendo is marketing it as a tool for fitness, but Wii Fit's designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, maintains that it is also a fun game to play with friends. With that in mind, we got up off our gaming couch to limber up for a few hours of Wii Fit to give you an idea of what it's all about.

If you're overweight in real life, expect to see your Mii suddenly adorned with a big beer belly.

The package, which retails for £69.99 in the UK ($138.16), consists of the Wii Fit disc and the new balance board peripheral. The balance board, which is a white wireless pair of electronic scales, measures shifts in weight in order to monitor things such as balance, movement, and pressure. Before it can do that, it needs to be set up to recognise your weight, height, and body mass index, which it can then monitor over time to help you reach your fitness goals.

The setup process is a little bit lengthy, but in traditional Nintendo style there's an element of play involved in finding out just how unhealthy you are. The first step is to choose or create the Mii character who will represent you in the game. This character is then dropped into the Wii Fit menu system and will act as your avatar when you play through the main game. Before that, though, there's some history, mainly about how the world's posture has been deteriorating. Nintendo puts that down to two things: a lack of exercise and age-weakened muscles. As you're warned of fat accumulation and something called metabolic syndrome, the onscreen balance board begins to shake in fear, but there's no need to worry, it assures you--as long as you play Wii Fit every day that is!

After the doom-and-gloom medical warning, it's on to the actual calibration of the machine. Wii Fit uses your height, date of birth, and weight to work out your BMI, against which you're categorised as either underweight, ideal, overweight, or obese. With that taken into account, your Mii character changes to reflect your current BMI, growing a belly for "overweight" or "obese" or shrinking down for "underweight." You can also choose to see your actual weight in stone or kilograms, although only the narcissistic among you may choose to reveal such information. Thankfully, you can password-protect your stats to keep them out of the view of nosy friends.

Wii Fit then issues you your first balance test to work out your athletic ability and Wii Fit age. This involves shifting the emphasis of weight between each leg so that, for example, 60 percent is on your right leg and 40 percent is on your left. The more accurate you are at doing this repeatedly within the 30-second limit, the greater your athletic ability and the lower your Wii Fit age. While playing the game among a number of people, we didn't see anyone attain a Wii Fit age lower than their actual age, and it usually indicated that our physical ability was around 10 years above our actual age.

Thankfully, Wii Fit lets you set a goal for your weight loss or, depending on your condition, weight gain. Wii Fit will advise you of how far you have to go to reach your target BMI, and you can set a weight-change plan to work towards this. The game can recognise if your weight change is unhealthy and will advise you to stick to a plan of changing your weight by only a few pounds every couple of weeks. Nevertheless, you can review your weight-loss plan every fortnight if you want to change your goals, while the game keeps a tally of the amount of time you put into the exercises with the FitPiggy--a piggy bank that collects all the time you've spent working out in the game. New games are unlocked at 10-minute intervals, so you don't have to play for long to open up more challenges.

You can choose either a male or a female trainer. It's uncanny how everyone always picks the opposite sex...

Guiding you through the game is either a male or a female training instructor, whom you can view from different angles in order to fully grasp the moves they perform during exercises. The instructor will also dish out tips based on the feedback the game gets through the balance board. This includes advice to straighten your spine in the yoga class or to slow down during the repetitive muscle exercises. There are four types of exercises in Wii Fit: yoga, muscle workouts, aerobic exercises, and balance games. Each of these categories has four games opened at the start (with the exception of muscle workouts, which has five), and the more you play, the more you can unlock.

The aerobic exercises and balance games are the most traditional gamelike challenges in Wii Fit, although the game does advise you to push yourself in the yoga and muscle workouts categories for the most efficient fat burning. Aerobic exercises include hula hoop, step basics, jogging, and two-player jogging, the latter of which can be played cooperatively as long as you have two Wii Remotes. By putting the remote in your pocket and jogging on the spot, Wii Fit is able to monitor your burn rate and advises you how fast to run to minimise the strain on your muscles. The step basics mode is great fun, testing your sense of rhythm by having you play a basic version of a dance mat game. Jumping on stage with a bunch of other Miis, you have to move on and off the balance board in time to the music, with an onscreen guide showing you when and where your feet should be.

The balance game section contains nine quite tricky games to test your balance, four of which you can play from the off. Two are skiing based: one a slalom and one a jump. Another is based on football, in which you need to move your body to header oncoming balls and miss the pandas and football boots. Table tilt is a fiendishly difficult take on Mercury Meltdown, where you must use your body weight to tilt a maze to get a ball to fall through a hole. It can be incredibly difficult to do this during the later stages with more than four balls onscreen, but it's strangely addictive and very taxing on the legs.

The muscle workouts are where Wii Fit really gets taxing, and with regular use it should have a noticeable effect on your physique. The standard gym favourites are present from the start, including press-ups, twists, and lunges, and you can choose to do a different number of repetitions each time you play. Again, the balance board measures your shift in balance and can tell when you're doing a proper press-up--half-baked efforts will go unrecorded and will result in a lower overall grade. Likewise, the board is very accurate at measuring your wobbly legs as you struggle to adopt the tree position during yoga, and the clear scoring system can make it quite a competitive game to play against your friends.

As well as aiming to improve your overall fitness, Wii Fit highlights your balance and weight distribution, so as to reduce everyday wear and tear on joints and muscles.

The monitoring system keeps track of your daily progress, marking the days you've played as well as any change in your BMI and centre of gravity. The game places an emphasis on good posture, so as well as tracking your overall health, it aims to improve your centre of balance to minimise the stress of everyday life on your body. Graphical representation of the data also makes it easy to see how you're progressing towards your goal, and you can even add exercises done outside of Wii Fit, such as running, swimming, or just plain walking--perfect for those with an active lifestyle...and dirty cheaters.

We really like what we've seen of Wii Fit, and it has enough charm to be both a fun game and a real way of getting more exercise. There's clear scope for the balance board too, as it's another relatively simple peripheral for the Wii with a lot of potential uses. We'd have loved to see some sort of online integration for Wii Fit, with daily tips or the ability to compare progress with friends, but it's still great fun to compete against people locally. Look out for a full review of Wii Fit when it launches worldwide later this month.