Wiiiii! (plus request for advice)

[submarine_bells]

I've had my eye on the Wii console for a while now, in a sort of "that sounds interesting" kind of way. The style of gameplay it seems to encourage (social, fun) appeals to me, and the fact that some of the games that it comes with tend toward the more physically active end of the range is a big plus. See, most of my daily activities tend to be

Comments

[submarine_bells]

Cool. I've heard good things about the Raving Rabbids game, so I'll certainly keep that in mind. :-)

[aquaeri]

Yep, Rayman is very silly fun, and Mario Smooth Moves is also silly fun (but best at smallish parties). If you can persuade someone else to play with you, Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz has some also quite tiring games, including a version of Simon Says :-).

We have an actual WiiFit. It has four sections: yoga, strength, aerobic, and balance. The yoga and strength is definitely plain exercise. The balance I'd nearly all call games, most of which I am crap at. The aerobic section includes a few bits that have game aspects (the hula-hoop where you have to catch rings, and the step where you have to follow the stepping patterns - if you like DDR, it's sort of like that, only not quite enough variety, and the boxing which I haven't done enough to decide if it's too repetitive).
Mind you, to get to the balance games you have to do a "weight check-in" which I mutter my way through.

[australian_joe]

Seconding this.

All of the Wii Fit strength and yoga activities are clearly "just" exercise programs, and most (but not all) of the aerobic ones, but there is an entire Games section which, well, feel like games. :)

You do have to unlock games with activity in the other areas though, so I could see that being frustrating for someone determined to not do formal structured exercise.

[submarine_bells]

It's not so much a matter of being "determined" not to do formal structured excercise as finding them unutterably tedious and thus not really being motivated to continue them for more than a few sessions. The WiiFit package would be a lot more appealing to me if I could skip the formal excercise and weight critique sections and just go straight to the games or other activities that actually held some appeal to me. The balance board itself looks like an interesting bit of kit, and I might sometime be tempted to get one of those to play *other* games on it that use it. Pity it doesn't seem to be available on its own without the WiiFit software. :-\ Still, this is why we have ebay...

[australian_joe]

I'm not sure the board on its own will even work without the WiiFit disk, it will have drivers etc on it for the Wii console. There was a certain amount of registering the board with the console which seemed to require resources from the disk.

I don't recall any mandatory weigh-ins, but definitely the full set of WiiFit games are unlocked only through specific activities and cumulative time spent.

The balance board is slowly being integrated into other games. I know you can use it as drum pedals in WiiMusic. Not sure about anything else yet.

Games :-)

[anonymous]

Shaun White snowboarding is great, and you'll get a lot of exercise out of Wii Sports. I bought Wii fit and lost 10 kilos in half a year, and then I stopped for a while and gained some again :-)) anyway, it's great fun, and there will be more games out this spring or summer that concentrate on you loosing weight...

Contact me in world if you want to talk about it :-))

Transparent Banshee

Re: Games :-)

[submarine_bells]

Ah, I'd been eyeing up the snowboarding/skateboarding games that use the balance board, and wondering if they'd be as much fun as I imagined! The balance board will have to wait a bit - I've spent all my spare pocket money this month already on the Wii console itself and the DDR game! But I'm certainly making a point of hunting down reviews of games that seem appealing, so that I've got some idea what I might want to get when I do have some spare cash again!

I might well have a chat with you in-world sometime about all this. Console gaming seems to be a rather different animal to PC gaming, and I'm definitely still finding my feet here. Things are going to be a bit nuts in RL for the next few months though, what with the major data collection phase for my study almost upon me, and I'll mostly be ducking into SL briefly to deal with store customers and that sort of thing rather than spending a lot of time in world socialising. So I dunno when I'll see you, but I would like to hear your opinions on this stuff in more detail, for sure!