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Tis the season to stuff one's face with turkey, cake, more turkey and for adults, plenty of Yuletide spirits. So what better way to waft in the New Year while slouched recovering on your sofa than with the gut-busting Wii Fit U for the Wii U.

After all, there does seem to be an awful lot of us out there determined to banish those double chins and bingo wings - the previous entries in the series have notched up over 40 million sales between them, generating enough sweat to replace the Earth's oceans. Probably.

With that fetching mental image in mind, enter Wii Fit U, the latest incarnation of the series that in its fully fledged form comes resplendent with Nintendo's balance board (or as a version without it, for those who still have the board from their Wii). The process for getting started is simple enough - get on said balance board and go through a set-up process that sees you entering your age and height before the humiliation begins getting down to the nitty gritty of checking your weight and testing your balance.

From there, you'll be given your all-important Body Mass Index (still not quite sure what that actually is but we suspect the bigger your BMI, the bigger you are). And that's it - you're off, working out to (and wheezing through) a daily onscreen exercise regime tailor-made for your body type and needs.

There are of course your usual yoga and muscle workouts to contend with (and these are essential if you are serious about losing that flab) but as ever, what makes the Wii Fit experience so gratifying are its mini-games; these are varied and imaginative, playing to the console's strengths of 'gamifying' exercising.

From kung fu and jazz dancing to solving sums with your hips (yes, you read that right), Wii Fit U offers up a wide variety of silliness that, when used in conjunction with the balance board and GamePad, ensures that exercising needn't be the monotonous, tedious, soulless and joyless experience one usually gets at the local gym.

As ever, the whole package is impressively comprehensive and offers a genuinely practical way to shed pounds for only a modest outlay of, well, pounds - and when compared to a gym membership, it's actually something of bargain. The only weak link of the package? Well, as ever, that will be U and your longterm commitment to reducing the size of your bottom.