Wii Fit and Wii Sports have kicked off a fitness craze for the Wii, and it’s not hard to see why; people have their eyes on what could be a really lucrative market. The jOG (yes, it’s really spelled that way) is New Concept’s take on it, and it’s a pedometer that hooks up to your Wiimote. The box claims this product will “move your character with your running motion,” but that’s not what really happens.

The jOG connects to your Wiimote, then you connect the Nunchuk to the jOG. By sitting between these two parts, the jOG can pass along signals to the analog stick. But here’s the catch: It will only do so if you’re moving at a certain speed. You don’t have to go all that fast, even a modest jog is enough to make the connection work. The problem is that you absolutely must be moving, or no analog stick input gets through at all. Even moving through menus, if they aren’t compatible with the Wiimote pointer, requires you to be moving. No, I’m not kidding: To even move the cursor for the most basic of tasks means you have to jog in place looking like some kind of idiot.

The back of the box hailed this as the “ground breaking add-on for the Wii that lets you control your game character movement by joging on the spot” (their typo, not mine) but that’s a pretty generous definition of ’control.’ If you’re already thinking this sounds like a bad idea, you’d be right. But I had to give it a fair try, and an included list of games said that it would work well with Mario Kart Wii and Smash Bros. Brawl. I had those handy, so I fired them up and found a friend to play me online. How did it go?