Sommer located the Ninento Wii Tom and Charles have been looking for and I tried it out earlier this evening: Wii Sports is pretty awesome. That said, there's something odd about a video game system that's actually physically strenuous. I got into some monster rallies playing Wii Tennis and I think I hurt my elbow. I mean, at the end of the day are we going to get boxing video games you can only win by becoming a really great boxer? Why not just box? Less head trauma, I guess. But I sort of miss the old John Elway's Quarterback days when I could be a superstar without knowing a damn thing about how to play football.
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A-Wii We Go
27 Dec 2006 01:23 am
Comments (12)
The other day, I was playing the Nintendo ultra-realistic tennis video game. You bring actual rackets and balls out to an actual tennis court, and every time you smack a ball, you loudly shout "Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!". It turns out to be oddly fun. And the 3-D rendering is absolutely amazing - excellent detail.
The only WII game I've played for an extended period of time was the you vs. bunnies game (favorite was the filling their goggles with carrot juice as they rushed the beach). There are going to be some serious elbow injuries from this system. Ten minutes of gaming wears on the elbows like three hours of tennis.
don't knock the boxing. that's the really awesome part. there's a huge rush after knocking out the other guy. clearly i've been missing something by not engaging in more fistfights. on the other hand, your unending tennis rallies were kind of dull.
As soon as I can afford a nice projector, I'm gonna invest in a Wii. Playing at work with a big projector that gives the boxing game that real-life feel was just amazing. I could get some serious exercise on this thing.
Just wait till you play baseball. My shoulder was sore for days. I did figure out how to reliably throw 95 mph, but the 65 mph screwball started seeming like a much better option.
There was an article about this in Slate a while back - the author wrote about how he had to learn all about football in order to beat his brother at Madden '07. Honestly, it made we want to get the game.
"You bring actual rackets and balls out to an actual tennis court, and every time you smack a ball, you loudly shout "Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!". It turns out to be oddly fun. And the 3-D rendering is absolutely amazing - excellent detail."
I hear the physics engine and AI are unbelievably realistic too. But the whole idea of a video game that involves full-body physical motion is just...unsettlingly "cyber" to me, like that factory in China where people have full-time jobs farming characters for online RPGs, or the very existence of Google Earth.
I want all this disturbing William Gibson stuff to go away. Bring on the global warming and the peak oil! Luddites, arise!
"Just wait till you play baseball. My shoulder was sore for days."
Detroit Tiger fans know that one of their stud young pitchers, Joel Zumaya, missed the ALCS because he hurt his pitching arm playing "Guitar Hero II" ;)
Of the games I've played for the wii, wii sports seems to be the most physically demanding.
Oh, and you get over the wii elbow after a week or so.
The rumor is that most multi-platform games--pretty much any non-Nintendo-developed games-- will eventually support use of the Wii classic controller, a much more conventional controller currently used when you download NES, SNES or Nintendo 64 games onto your Wii. (My brother just downloaded MArio 64; what a classic.) The thinking is that the standard mash-buttons style interface that will be developed for PS3 and Xbox 360 games will be easy to port over, to be chosen as an optional alternative to the regular Wii motion sensing, swing your arm deal. I'm a little skeptical; I doubt most major game companies would support that much added functionality just because. But it would be cool to play a game like Madden and switch to a regular interface if you got tired of the Wii experience.
As a 47 year old father of two, I would say that the most important thing is to not forget your glasses so that you can actually see, in detail, what is going on the screen. I can pretty much talk my way to a win over the 6 year old, but the 10 year and his friends won't let me get in their heads, so they beat me more often than not. The glasses are key. If I'm not wearing my glasses, I get whipped. Also, I lose interest after 15 minutes or so. My legs aren't what they used to be, that's why I go for the haymaker in the early rounds of boxings.
Comments closed January 10, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
A couple of weeks ago, I was musing about the coming days of ultra-fit gamers; I totally should have anticipated the attendant physical therapy business boom.
Posted by ogged | December 27, 2006 1:44 AM