By John DeFore

As summer’s heat continues it’s assault, some parents may find it almost cruel to force the kids to go outside to play. Sure, when you were a kid your Mom wouldn’t let you inside between lunch and sundown — but then she didn’t have global warming to contend with.

In search of compromise, plenty of parents — and educators hoping to nudge seemingly irresistible social trends toward more healthful goals — have been encouraging the use of video games and other electronic toys that encourage some degree of physical involvement beyond the lightning-quick movement of thumbs.

The most visible of these is the Nintendo Wii, (pictured below, and in action at right) whose groundbreaking user interface captures movement from arm-swings and makes playing baseball or golf in a video game a little less ridiculous; heck, the Wii can even turn a couch potato icon like Mario Brothers into a robust physical activity. Vendors have expanded on Nintendo’s offerings with variants of the console’s remote that make computer assisted sports play more like the real thing, or at least look that way.

The Wii’s health implications got more explicit with the recently released Wii Fit, in which a balance-board controller is used to monitor users’ increasing aptitude at aerobics, yoga and the like. The thing is currently selling like hotcakes (as of this writing, it’s #1 at Amazon), though some users aren’t wholly impressed. Wired gave it a once over and decided it “feels very much like a version 1.0 trial run that’s going to be made obsolete by a better sequel in six months,” while The Onion adds it “comes off like a budget title” that “should have given users more instruction on a useful regimen.”

Those of us who decide to wait for a more full-featured Wii can go with a game in its prime: So far, the most successful “exergame,” one achieving an effortless-seeming match of fun with huffing and puffing, is Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR to fans) an

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