By Julian Murdoch

The market expansion brought on by the Wii is well-documented. It's also a little tiresome. So the arrival of yet-another wacky peripheral - especially one whose primary purpose is as a bathroom scale - had a certain flash-in-the-pan quality for most core gamers. As nifty as Wii Fit is, the Balance Board is so far a one-trick pony. It may not even be a particularly sprightly pony; Microsoft has been spreading the meme that 60% of Wii Fit purchasers take one lap around the plastic and then hang it up for good.

To be fair, Nintendo has tried to keep the Balance Board in the limelight. At E3, Ubisoft opened the Nintendo press conference with a baby-faced and perpetually-smiling Shaun White carving virtual snow on his ersatz snowboard in a short preview of his eponymous Christmas game debut. But other than that short bit of third-party theatrics, Nintendo has done little to disabuse us of the notion that the Wii Balance Board is destined for the same shelf-of-shame as the Wii Zapper.

Legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto mentioned it briefly in a recent 1up.com interview: "With Wii Music, we're using the Balance Board in the drum mode, and that drum mode is unplayable without the Wii Balance Board." While rumors of Balance Board support for Punch Out!! Wii abound, the game itself was missing in action at this year's E3. Which leaves Nintendo fanboys with nothing but the exciting prospect of using their Balance Board as a virtual high-hat.

Yet Miyamoto insists there's a bright future for the Balance Board. "With over 2 million sold in Japan, and other areas around the world catching up with those figures -- we definitely see a lot of possibilities."

But if not Nintendo, who?

At launch, the only third-party Balance Board game out was Namco Bandai's We Ski. Released a week ahead of Wii Fit here in the United States, We Ski was on the Balance Board bandwagon early in Japan. Namco Bandai's Masaya Kobayashi, producer on We Ski, remembers first seeing the Balance Board at E3 in 2007. "Instantly we contacted Nintendo and said we'd love to have this work for We Ski." Kobayashi, also director of the Ridge Racer series, is familiar with making games that use unique control systems - in particular, wheels and pedals. "We instantly understood how to make a game perfectly balanced for people, to have different but completely enjoyable experiences, any way they play it." But development-wise, getting in on the ground floor is important, explains Kobayashi. "The tools for designing are about the same," he says, "as long as you start programming the game with the balance board game in mind. Nintendo was in the loop the whole time with our development."

On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, developers weren't so in the loop. Scott Blackwood is the Executive Producer on the upcoming Skate It for EA Black Box in Vancouver. "We didn't know what it was," he explains, recalling his first glimpse of the Balance Board in the press. "We saw a picture, and it looked kinda cool."

But there was no program to sign up for, no early access for random Canadian developers. "The day we saw it we were all pretty much rubbing our hands together, waiting for someone to give us one so we could see what we could do with it," he says. Finally, someone in Black Box's marketing department got their hands on a Japanese import. "We absconded with it," explains Blackwood.

What followed was two months of rapid prototyping. "Within about 2-3 days we already had it hooked up and could stand on it and steer," he recalls. "It wasn't tuned. But right away, BOOM, we're standing on it and carving around like a skateboard."

From there it got more complicated. Over the coming months, Black Box's controls team developed a trick system which relies on cues from players' feet, and buttons (but thankfully not waggling) on the Wiimote.

But it turns out that was the easy part. Starting from scratch, the simplest things turned out to be the hardest.

"The biggest tuning task has been going in a straight line," Blackwood explains, frustration clear in his voice. "People can't tell whether they are leaning 5 degrees left or right."

For most kinds of motion - walking, cycling, surfing, or skating - moving in a straight line is the default. Skis want to go downhill. Skateboards have sprung trucks to keep the board straight. It takes effort to turn.

But as Blackwood says, "The tricks feel great - it's the going straight" that's a problem. Because the Balance Board is as inert as a granite slab. It doesn't want to go anywhere. It just is.

And, come to think of it, that's a pretty good description of its place in the market too.