Blog Archives
Walk It Out record screens
One great thing about Walk It Out is its thorough record keeping. From the game itself, you can go into a menu and select a submenu called Records to see how many days you’ve played, steps you’ve stepped, and calories you’ve burned, and compare those numbers with other players. 6 player profiles can be stored, and there’s also a guest mode which is handy for demonstrating the game to friends.
The Calendar screen will show you exactly which days you’ve played. A rainbow indicates that you collected all 7 rainbow spheres that day, which usually entails walking all over the map.
Calendar screen
On the Status screen, which is shown at the end of each session (or you can pull it up in the middle of a session), you can see your BMI (calculated from when you entered your height and weight to create the profile), calories burned (calculated from your number of steps), steps, distance walked and time played.
Status screen
The Graph screen lets you compare how you did with the other players. Your steps, distance or calories are shown with yellow bars, and the colored lines are for each other player who has a profile.
Graph screen
In addition to these, there are ranking screens that list players in order of most steps, most rainbows, etc. So if you have several walkers in the household, you can engage in a little friendly competition that will result in everyone being a winner in the exercise game.
Another video game myth has been shattered
We all know that video games keep kids indoors, socially isolated, and immobilized except for their thumbs, right? Wrong. A couple of White House bureaucrats and their kids are busting that myth with a little help from Pokemon.
In a whitehouse.gov blog post, Peter Emanuel reports that his 11-year-old son, Devon, just got the new Pokemon DS game that comes with a pedometer that strengthens your pocket monster the more you walk. Devon likes it so much that he wrote a letter to the First Lady suggesting it as a way to help her in her campaign to fight child obesity:
Dear First Lady Michelle Obama:
My dad told me that you think it is really important that kids exercise and eat right, so I wanted to write this letter to tell you about a new video game I just got because you would find it interesting. My parents are always telling me that I have been playing my video games all day and that I should go outside and play. My sister, Isabel, plays softball and soccer, but I’m not into that. I was really excited this weekend because my dad took me out to pick up the new Pokémon Heart Gold and Soul Silver game that I ordered. The store helped me unlock a new character in my game when I picked it up, and they gave me a Poke Walker that I clip to my pants. It counts my steps when I walk. Today I beamed one of my Pokémon named Onix into the Poke Walker. When I walked around so did my Pokémon. He earned watts in the game and that helps him evolve. The book also said that when I earn enough watts I can start battles and catch other Pokémon that I usually can’t find. I want to earn enough watts so I can catch Castiform or Kecleon. The book says that once I catch them in the Poke Walker I can beam them back into my game. I haven’t done that yet. I need to take a longer walk so that I can earn enough points. Dad says it should stop raining soon and we can walk around the neighborhood. I hope you are having a good time at the White House.
Sincerely,
Devon Emanuel
One of his dad’s colleagues, Debbie Stine, reports that her daughter Tina-Marie is also getting into walking with her Pokewalker. (And apparently you need to walk 1000 miles to unlock all the available routes, so better have some comfy shoes and keep those water bottles full!)
Devon mentions in his letter that his sister plays sports, but “I’m not into that.” How many of us were treated like outcasts in PE class because we simply couldn’t hit a ball or run as fast as the others? What are you learning when you’re seated on a bench or isolated in the outfield? With new games and new technology, now everyone can choose to be active and social in ways they enjoy and are good at, whether it’s traditional sports or exergaming. None of it is “wrong”. Go Devon, go Isabel, go Tina-Marie, and more power to your parents and your monsters.
A rhythm nation is Walking It Out
Watch your back, Just Dance. A new challenger is ambling toward the title of sleeper video game hit of 2010, or more accurately, “the game the gamers love to hate and everyone else is finding irresistable”.
Of course we’re talking about Walk It Out, which was released 2 months ago and didn’t make much initial noise other than guffawing from game critics. In WIO, you just walk (or jog or jump) through a cartoony fantasy land called Rhythm Island, using a DDR mat (an Active Life mat also works), balance board or just the remote/nunchuck. With each step recognized by the game, you get a point, and you spend those points furnishing the nearly-barren island with trees, buildings, fountains and even bridges to other islands, as well as gaining new songs and a daily rainbow.
That’s all there is to it: walk, point and shoot at prize capsules. Even I thought it sounded a little dumb at first. But it got some good reviews out of the gate at Amazon, so when they put it up as a one-day special for $10 off, I bit. And like a growing number of fans – here, here, here and here – I got sucked into the happy little world (Bob Ross would’ve loved it) of Rhythm Island.
Happy little trees! (courtesy of Gamespot)
As with other addicting casual games like Bejeweled and Tetris, simplicity is key. The easy, monotonous gameplay lets you while away hours, only with Walk It Out, you’re on your feet and burning calories while whiling away. And while the soundtrack isn’t as party-in-a-box as Just Dance or We Cheer, it is huge (120 songs) and has a variety of both genres and tempos.
Wii often gets criticized for being standard-def in a high-def world, but Rhythm Island has terrific detail for its graphical limitations, from drifting clouds to shifting shadows in breeze-blown cherry blossom trees. Cows moo and streams whisper as you stroll past. And depending on the time of day, the island changes from sunny days to starry nights, or you can unlock the “magical” clock and warp to whatever time you choose. Most of the time, though, I stick to real-life time, whether it’s a mid-morning walk in the blazing sun (no need for sunscreen or bug spray), an after-dinner sunset stroll, or a late-night walk in lieu of Jay or SNL – or a midnight raiding of the fridge.
Walk It Out is also very well-designed as a fitness game, with enough profiles for 6 people to track BMI, calories, steps and distance. I’ll go into those record screens in detail in a future post. Two can play, and it’s ideal for families. My 8-year-old has been enthusiastically playing the game nearly every day.
This game combines pick-up-and-play simplicity, the fantasy-world attraction of Animal Crossing or Farmville, mostly-good tunes, and a healthy angle into a can’t-miss package. It also has much less of a learning curve than DDR, and superior workout record-keeping. (I just got DDR Hottest Party 3, which I’ll review in another post; it’s improved over previous editions, but workout mode is still lame.) With Walk It Out and/or Just Dance for cardio plus Wii Fit and/or EA Sports Active for strength and flexibility, you could have yourself a very well-rounded exercise program on the Wii.
Pokemon DS pedometer is confirmed
Last fall, I wrote that two upcoming Pokemon games for Nintendo DS, HeartGold and SoulSilver, included a pocket pedometer that counts steps and powers up the game the more a player walks around. The full descriptions of the games are now posted at Amazon, and they will be released in March.
Another DS game that rewards you for walking around, at least in a heavily-populated area, is Treasure World. This game detects wi-fi signals using the DS’s wireless internet capability, and those signals unlock “treasures” within the game that you can then share and trade with other players online. I never really got into these trading games, but they’re huge on Facebook, and my daughter got hooked on the Wii trading game Animal Crossing when we rented it for just one day. So with games like Treasure World and the Pokemon pedometer games, who knows, your kids might actually beg you to take them for a walk, which will do the whole family some good.
List of active games has been added
Since Walk It Out appears to be the last exergame to be released for a little while, and lots of folks who got Wiis for holiday gifts are asking around for games that help burn off the holiday feasts, I added a page (look up over the header) that lists all the active and fitness-related home console games I know of.
I haven’t tried all the games (I wish!) but I’ve written about many of them on this blog, and if I hear of any new ones, I’ll add them to the list. (Right after I posted, I realized I’d completely left out the Eye Toy series. Shows how good my Eye Toy experience was…)
Exergames have certainly exploded in the ten years since DDR arrived on the scene and gamers started wondering why their extra flab was disappearing. It’s now in a genre of its own, and there should be something on that list to get practically anyone moving and grinning.
