VIDEO GAMES BLOGS
VIDEO GAMES BLOGS

Here’s the verdict from a previously very skeptical Kotaku.com:

Let’s get this out of the way: Wii Fit does work. Why wouldn’t it? It’s based on time-trued exercises. Stuff like doing sit-ups, push-ups and jogging. Well, jogging in place. But, to what extend does it work? For the past month, I’ve used Wii Fit on nearly a daily basis. Wii Fit isn’t something you can review in 8 hours of play. You need weeks, months even! My Wii Fit workout was interrupted by two breaks: One for when my wife was sick (and I then got sick) and another when my wife was sick again (Nintendo, please make Wii Healthy, kthanxbai). Like with most things, results do vary from person to person. For me, some of it worked brilliantly. And some of it not.
“…when I started regularly going to the swimming hall, my weight dropped quite a bit, and it felt like my overall fitness had increased as well. I started thinking that getting fit could actually be fun.”
—Shigeru Miyamoto

Last year, I began power walking. This writing job involves a great deal of sitting. And since I work at home, there’s not much impetus for me to leave the house. (Getting dressed is a challenge most days as well.) Back before I got married and I spent my time talking to semi-pretty women and getting in bar fights (no, really), I weighed in at a meek 130 pounds. Know: I’m 5 foot 11 inches. I was super model thin, and shopping at chic Japanese boutiques was no problem. Then I got married, decided to quit smoking two packs a day and get very, very fat. I jumped up to 177 pounds. Blame Mrs. Bashcraft’s delicious cooking or being able to down a half a bottle of sake. A big bottle. All of my super swank designer clothes were too small. I suffered a horrible embarrassment at a Paul Smith boutique, where I used to shop regularly, where none of their sizes could fit me. Hello fat American! But, as I approach thirty, the slow realization has set-in: We don’t live forever. (That, and you can buy big designer clothes in America.)

So, I started trying to take better care of myself. You know, take vitamins, stop drinking entire bottles of sake and power walking. Power walking was great. An excuse to get out of the house and away from my job. Escape. I live right next to a river, and it was great to get exercise as the evening sun was glistening on that brown, cloudy river. During that course, I dropped five or six pounds, felt better about life. Then winter hit, I got cold, and I got wrapped up with several big magazine features and writing a book. I became a hermit. Well, a bigger hermit. Too busy to get out in the fresh air, I wanted something that would let me stay in shape inside. Something like Wii Fit.

“You don’t join a company like Nintendo and expect to work on an accessory that can weigh players, do you? (laughs)”
— Satoru Iwata

Back when Wii Fit was introduced at E3 last year, we were pretty dumb founded. Nintendo’s made a ton of crazy peripherals, but those were gaming peripherals. This wasn’t. Nintendo planned on taking Wii Sports one step further. There was an instant appeal for the title for both gamers and casuals players. Here was something that could make us not tubby. Hooray! This isn’t the magic bullet that many gamers are looking for. If you want results, you’ll need to put in the time. During the course of my Wii Fitting, I ended up losing weight. Not much, but still. Likewise, Vinnk over at 4 Color Rebellion has dropped the pounds. He’s recorded his progress in-depth here, here and here. A must read if you are serious about losing weight. Thing is, I’m not exactly sure how much credit to give Wii Fit. Gaming-wise, it’s revolutionary, but exercise-wise? Go jogging everyday for thirty minutes. You’ll lose weight. Promise. And it’s totally free!

And it sounds so stupid. But weighing yourself everyday does make you aware of your own body. It is a bit like watching a kettle boil, though. You become aware of how your body weight changes during the course of the day, and that’s something so obvious that I hadn’t every really thought of it before. I noticed that I was eating less, because I knew pigging out would totally muck up my progress. Below is my weight chart for the past month. I started out at roughly 79 kilograms (174 pounds), which is almost overweight for someone of my height. (Ironically, that’s about where I ended up!) Even as I was doing Wii Fit on a regular basis, I noticed odd spikes up and down. I ballooned at one point, it seems, but then got that back down during my training. Since your weight changes during the day, when you weigh yourself seems to matter as much as, well, what you do. Oh, and that huge upwards spike? Mrs. Bashcraft thought it would be funny if she pressed her foot on the Balance Board while weighing myself (she didn’t know it was for work). Hilarious!

Read the rest HERE

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by: ashley
 Microsoft to release possibly the noisiest, most graphically impressive batch of games — but ‘Halo Wars’ is nowhere to be found.

SAN FRANCISCO — Six publishers showcased more than 40 new games to the press in San Francisco and Los Angeles last week, previewing their biggest bets for the remainder of 2008.

The company with the second-fewest games — but possibly the noisiest, most graphically impressive and narratively ambitious batch — was Microsoft.

The Xbox 360 lineup will be led by “Gears of War 2,” which was shown to reporters at Dogpatch Studios in a demo controlled by the game’s lead developer, Cliff Bleszinski of Epic Games. The game might not be done, but the talking points are far along. Read more…

According to Stephen Totilo