Alternate takes on “Wii Fit”

My arms are still aching from my Wii Fit workout routines this week, but that’s not stopping me from bringing you the latest news and views on Nintendo’s new workout game.

Game review site GameSpot found that Wii Fit fell short as a game and as an exercise product. They criticize it for not offering a multiplayer component, for not letting you create custom workouts and dispensing shallow fitness advice.

Former ninja turned tech blogger Brian Lam says it’s better for building “fitness consciousness” and building you up to a base level of fitness that will let you graduate to more strenuous exercises.

Quick notes from my Day 6 workout yesterday: I started with 10 minutes of jogging in place, which got the heart pumping a little and gave me a light sheen of perspiration.

That turned into full-bore torrents of sweat once I did the push-ups with the torso-twisting “plank” maneuver.

The yoga activities actually got a little easier.

I’m still unlocking new activities, so there’s been something new to try every day.

Anybody read anything else interesting about Wii Fit?

The best MMORPG

There was a blog post making the rounds today reviewing the outdoors as if it were a massively multiplayer role-playing game. Some clever bits:

The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player’s ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players’ tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely “survive”. What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

 This instantly reminded me of one of my favorite piece of gaming journalism, a GameSpot article reviewing real life as if it were a game. I believe the GameSpot piece is from 2003 or so and is the earliest example I’ve seen of this sort of satire. It’s almost too good to excerpt, but here are a couple samples:

This example is evidence of some of the amazing depth offered by real life–there are so many different options and viable decisions for a character to make that it’s just about impossible for any one character to see everything and visit all the colorful and sometimes dangerous locations. Unlike in other MMORPGs, combat actually isn’t a major factor for most players in real life, though players are bound to engage in a few skirmishes early in their lives. Interestingly, though, real life does offer an amazingly intricate combat system, featuring complex hand-to-hand and ranged combat options that a character may learn and even specialize in.

And:

you’d think more players would be drawn to combat in real life, and in some territories, they are. However, the PVE (player vs. environment) aspect of real life is relatively unpopular, and the PVP (player vs. player) portion, while interesting, is far too risky for most of the population. That’s on account of the game’s very strict death penalty and punitive system–you may freely attempt to harm or kill any other player at any time, but you will then likely be heavily punished by the game’s player-run authorities. The punitive system has loopholes and other problems, allowing certain players to elude punishment and continue to engage in various player-killing activities.

GameSpot scored the game a 9.6.