Coolest Easter Eggs

Star Power: Gaming as a Second Career

Fitness Gaming Through the Years

Believe it or not, the fitness gaming craze didn't start with Wii Fit. Exergames have been with us since the early days of gaming, and while many of them gassed out on the side of memory lane, they all helped push us to play a little harder. Grab a towel, slip on a headband, and check out some of the healthiest games ever.

Donkey Kong Country Returns

Platforms: Wii

Donkey Kong Country Returns

He typically plays second banana to Mario, but this week original Nintendo tough-guy Donkey
Kong swings back into action as the star of his very own Wii game. Donkey Kong Country
Returns is the spiritual successor to the 1994 Super Nintendo platforming great Donkey Kong Country -- and if critics are to be believed, its 16-year evolution was worth it.

Averaging a potassium-packed 89 at Metacritic, the Wii-exclusive is garnering some pretty glowing praise.

"The magic of Donkey Kong Country Returns lies in its
ability to genuinely capture the sensibilities of the original without
pretense," says writer Christina Troup in an 'A' review for 1Up,
adding

Wii, DS: still crazy (popular) after all these years If a lack of games is dampening consumer interest in Nintendo's market-leading Wii and DS consoles, you wouldn't have known it from this year's Thanksgiving sale offers. Widespread Black Friday discounts on the machines brought an early Christmas present for Nintendo, according to its internal
estimates.

DS sales -- buoyed by discounts, bundle deals, and the release of new
hardware colors -- totalled 900,000 over Thanksgiving week, a number
significantly in excess of the half-million or so units Nintendo could
reasonably expect to sell over a normal month. The Wii did almost as
well, "only" selling 600,000 or so systems, again easily more than the
system's normal monthly tally.

Nintendo's

Your Shape: Fitness Evolved Remember when Wii Fit was considered the most cutting-edge exergame
on the planet? It's hard to believe Nintendo's slickly-executed fitness phenomenon
came out a mere two-and-a-half years ago, reshaping gamer waistlines and
turning the bundled Balance Board into a must-have piece of tech.

Nowadays? It's downright old-fashioned.

Such is the way of the world in gaming, where technological innovation is as common as an extra life. And courtesy of the motion-sensing systems of PlayStation Move and Microsoft Kinect, fitness gaming has stepped off the scale and into an entirely new home gym.

Ubisoft's Your Shape: Fitness Evolved (Xbox 360) is one such effort. Tailor-made for Kinect, this

Gran Turismo 5 Six years in the making, the latest in Sony's genre-defining Gran Turismo
series skid onto shelves Wednesday. It's been far from a smooth road,
though, as the game was originally scheduled to be released in March,
but repeated delays left some fearing it would miss 2010 altogether.
Those fears proved unfounded, but have the delays given Sony's Polyphony
Digital time to deliver fans the polished experience they wanted?

Yes, says Destructoid's Dale North.
Scoring it a perfect 10, he lavishes praise on its size ("massive"),
its driving feel ("both accurate and exciting at the same time"), and
its visuals ("one of the most visually pleasing games ever released").
Its damage modeling, a new

Holiday shopping for gamers should, in theory, be an easy affair. After all, with so many titles on the market, it's just a matter of choosing the best one, right?

But there's a good chance your gamer already has a copy of what you're buying. Or, perhaps, he or she isn't a fan of the blockbuster that GameStop or Best Buy employee assured you was a surefire winner. And gift cards? They're just so impersonal.

Video game culture, thankfully, extends beyond games themselves. Here are a few alternative suggestions you might want to consider:

Gunnar glasses Gunnar Optiks computer glasses — ($79-$189)

Hardcore gamers can spend hours staring at their monitors. Gunnar Optiks glasses not only relieve the