As part of a media campaign to celebrate the release of the sequel to their popular Wii Sports game, Nintendo announced on Thursday they would be touring around the country with a portable island straight out of Wii Sports Resort.
Starting with a huge display in the middle of Times Square, the portable islands will have plenty of fruity (but non-alcoholic beverages), a steel drum band, a reflecting pool and a lounge area. Oh, yeah…You’ll also be able to try out Wii Sports Resort!
Jorge and Samuel are doing it wrong. Image courtesy of hdaniel
Health care is big business. Just ask President Obama. Even with our twenty-four hour news cycle being overrun with updates about the Iranian Elections or the latest round of tragic celebrity deaths, there is still almost daily coverage of the debate in Washington about the future of health care in America. While there is a great deal of conflict over what exactly the cure is for our ailing health care system, it seems as though everyone agrees that something needs to be done to reign in the rate at which health care spending continues to grow. If nothing changes the current estimates indicate that by 2017 health care expenses will top nearly $4.7 trillion dollars (nearly 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product).
With all of that money floating around in the health care system it should not come as much of a shocker to learn that in the last 18 months exergames have generated nearly $2 Billion dollars in worldwide sales. Despite our ever-expanding waist lines (or perhaps as a direct result of them) video game fans are flocking to fitness related video games like Wii Fit and EA SPORTS Active.
It appears as though the battle for supremacy in the exergame field continues! Not content to sit back and let EA SPORTS Active steal all the thunder when it comes to fitness gaming, Nintendo recently announced an expansion to the popular Wii Fit title during the E3 conference in Los Angeles, California.
The appropriately named Wii Fit Plus is scheduled to be released this Fall in time for the Holiday shopping season. Available as a complete package with the Wii Balance Board or as a stand-alone expansion for those who already own Wii Fit, Wii Fit Plus includes all the exercises of the original game along with 15 new balance games and six new yoga and strength training activities.
You will never un-see this. Ever.
I’ve been writing a lot about the whole fitness gaming genre recently. I’m doing so because I think the genre has a tremendous amount of potential to really push video games as something good in our lives instead of the common misconception that gaming is bad for you (a misconception that, unfortunately, our current President seems to share).
As with anything that becomes a hit in popular culture, though, there will inevitably be a flood of cheap imitators that simply wish to capitalize on the success of those who came before them. Airplane! was brilliant. Meet The Spartans? Not so much. Creativity and innovation have a tendency to get watered down in pursuit of the all mighty dollar in the long run.
I don’t think we’ve gotten quite to that point when it comes to the exergame genre yet, but I know we have at least one entry that’s causing me to react with a hearty WTF?
If the video game industry worked the way my naive mind believed it did the steps involved in the creation of a new video game would look something like this.
1) Come up with an awesome idea for a new video game.
2) ???
3) Profit!
Step 2 probably involves all kinds of, you know, work. The kind of thing I generally try to avoid as much as I possibly can. Fortunately for slackers like me the folks over at Humana Games For Health are having a contest that pretty much fulfills my game design dreams.
There has been a considerable amount of innovation that has surfaced over the last few years in the fitness gaming market. From dance pads to balance boards game developers are constantly thinking up new ways to get us moving in order to get healthy while we entertain ourselves. “Exergaming” seems to be one of the next great things in the video game realm and those of us who enjoy the genre eagerly look forward to the next big thing that is going to come down the line.
The folks over at Black Bean Games are hoping they have found the new hotness.
I’ve made it past the first big milestone in the my experiment with the EA SPORTS Active 30 Day Challenge by completing 10 workouts. As a reward I got a new trophy and an “attaboy” video from Bob Green in which he explained that they were going to be increasing the difficulty of my workouts from this point on. I’m much more comfortable with how the program works and I’m learning the proper way to move to maximize the benefit I’m getting from my workouts.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve become a total EA SPORTS Active fanboy I thought I’d take some time this week to share my thoughts on ways I think the game could be improved.
We here at ShrinkGeek are clearly not the only folks excited about the latest fitness game for the Nintendo Wii, EA SPORTS Active. Nintendo announced on Monday that the game sold more than 600,000 units in the first two weeks of being on the market.
With numbers like that it shouldn’t be much of a surprise to learn that Nintendo is already planning to roll out the first expansion for the game in time for the holiday shopping season.
In addition to the game itself, EA SPORTS Active comes with two additional accessories – A leg strap and a resistance band. My first half an hour or so with the game was spent reading the instructions on how to use these two contraptions. The resistance band has two canvas hand grips that will need to be attached to it but the process is fairly straightforward. The leg strap, however, was a bit more convoluted. I don’t feel it was difficult to figure out at all, but finding the right placement on your leg so that it’s comfortable AND doesn’t slide is a bit tricky (at least it was for me).
Once I proved I was more intelligent than some rubber and velcro I fired up the game itself. EA SPORTS Active does not use the default Mii avatars that are standard in the Nintendo Wii so when you’re setting up your profile you’ll need to create a new one. I don’t consdier this a bad thing, personally. One of the features I do not like about the Nintendo Wii in general is the overly cartoonish facet of the Mii’s and how they dominate many of the games from Nintendo itself. Call it a psychological hang up if you will, but the Mii’s make me feel like I’m playing a game designed for children and it just doesn’t work for me in Wii Fit.
I feel like I need to put a disclaimer out before I write this particular post, and so I shall.
Despite appearances to the contrary this site has not been taken over by the Nintendo Fanboy network.
What sparks me to state that before continuing is that I’m about to heap praise on Nintendo yet again for supporting video games that promote health and fitness. This time, however, they’ve done something that I personally wouldn’t have seen coming. This new contender in the “getting gamers healthy” game is for the Nintendo DS.