Wii Fit Plus remembers me. I gave Wii Fit a try when it first came out. So Plus knows it's been 585 days since my last workout. It knows I'm ten pounds heavier than back then. It remembers which exercises I've done. I remember it, too. Who could forget that dippy little balance board hopping around and talking to me like the paper clip from Microsoft Office? Will I ever get out of my head all those awful balance board minigames? My smarmy armless Mii hoola hooping? There's a reason I've been away from it for 600 days.

So why is Wii Fit Plus a welcome addition to my workout routine?

After the jump, how Wii Fit Plus fits in.

Fortunately, the new option for workout routines makes it easy to get around all the terrible stuff. Instead, I can focus on the good stuff. In this case, that means the yoga exercises. They're free of animated balance boards and dippy Miis. The presentation is simple and elegant, with an animated trainer guiding you through the poses. What's more, now that you can set up workout routines, I don't have to individually Wiimote through each pose one at a time. I can select a duration and Wii Fit Plus keeps the poses coming.

Unfortunately Wii Fit Plus still relies too much on keeping an annoying rot dot centered in a yellow circle. It does this to justify the balance board, which isn't very useful when it comes to yoga. I've learned to ignore the red dot, since the point of yoga is not to keep your ankles as steady as humanly possible, and that's pretty much all you're going to get from fixating on the red dot. Instead, the point of yoga is to hold a pose and control your breathing. I like the gentle wave sound effect that paces your breathing. The animated trainer does a good job of demonstrating and narrating the poses. The narrating is particularly important, since you're not always going to be facing the screen (by the way, EA Sports Active is fantastic at narrating exercises so you don't have to keep watching the screen).

I still have a hard time wading through all the presentation in Wii Fit Plus. It's not very intuitive. Ironically, it tries so hard to be player friendly that I can't figure it out. Workouts are labeled with nonsense categories like youth, form, or mind and body. Huh? I just want to get some exercise, not parse what Nintendo thinks each of these categories is supposed to mean. And each time I've tried to set up a routine, the annoying animated balance board seems to realize that I have no idea what I'm doing. It pops up and asks if I want to do a workout routine. Why, yes, annoying animated balance board, I do. Thank you for asking.

So I've been setting durations for yoga workouts to lead into my regular EA Sports Active routines. The two games are a great compliment to each other. The yoga in Wii Fit Plus serves as a wonderful stretching warm up. It's a low-intensity buffer dividing the rest of my day from the moderately demanding stuff I'm about to do in EA Sports Active.

Plus, I get to hear the trainer chick say, "Let's do the Downward Facing Dog pose together". I wonder if she knows how dirty that sounds?

So one week down, five to go. And I'm really happy with the two games I've found.