“Wii Fit Plus”
Genre: Exercise, fitness
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Platform: Wii
ESRB rating: “E” for Everyone
Price: $19.99 ($100 with Balance Board)
Grade: A

There’s one good reason to pick up “Wii Fit Plus.”

It’s in the name.

As implied, “Plus” picks up everything already in “Fit” and has a few enhancements, making the original “Fit” pretty much obsolete.

That’s especially good for “Fit” fans who grew bored of the original game’s balance, strength and yoga challenges and wanted fresh content, or wanted a way to customize their workouts. In “Plus,” Nintendo added 15 balance-oriented, avatar-illustrated fun activities and half a dozen strength and yoga routines. Nintendo also “unlocked” all the original “Fit” routines, so players who are new to the fitness-game genre can start wherever they like and “Fit” veterans aren’t compelled to start over. (“Plus” imports user profiles from the original “Fit,” anyway.)

Among other pluses in “Plus” are a calorie counter that doesn’t count calories, per se, but shows users how much exertion players would need to melt off the equivalent of, say, a glass of orange juice, an energy bar or a steak; more emphasis on correct individual form during the balance challenges; and a series of “target” routines addressing such things as posture, relaxation and — Game Guy’s favorite — overindulgence at mealtime.

“Plus” even has a feature for weighing pets, though it can’t really tell whether that’s actually Fido sitting on the Balance Board and thus doesn’t differ from a standard bathroom scale. It’s a nice little extra that Game Guy doubts anyone will use more than once (unless the pets enjoy it, of course) — kind of like the Body Mass Index calculator, which was interesting to try yet is no more an accurate measure of BMI in “Plus” as it was in “Fit.”

But the real improvement brought by “Plus” is the addition of customized training, allowing players to create a mix of their favorite routines in a continuous sequence so that they don’t have to stop their workouts to sort through the game menu. The routines also can be tweaked for length of time to increase difficulty and help bump “Plus” up the list of exercise games that afford real exercise.

Granted, “difficulty” is a relative term in the “Fit” franchise — fun remains the focus here. But “Plus” really does live up to its name and is worth the upgrade.