Vibrations flow, things will have to change

[austin_dern]

My father and I had visited my sister and her husband. As we got in my sister started talking about how she had been going to a ski jump and I should go too. I've not gone skiing for excellent reasons but I was surprised my sister had been, particularly in New Jersey in summer. It turned out that she had been talking about skiing on a Wii fitness device, and somehow I had missed critical nouns in that explanation. That's a different matter, of course, and after some nagging she finally talked me and my father into trying out some of the miscellaneous games.

And yes, the Wii Ski Jump was one of them. Apparently the system for this is to stand on a flat white plastic pad, crouched, as the Wii determines that my weight is noticeably different from that of my sister, and once it's satisfied with that then wait in a crouched position until you get the signal to ``jump'', which means to stand up straight rather swiftly. This soon turned into a minor obsession for me, as I would do one of the runs with reasonably good results --- a jump of about 170 meters or so --- and then crash horribly on the next even though I was doing the same work, sometimes drawing horrified looks from simulated Wii people. Eventually I finally got two good jumps; I still can't figure what it figured I wasn't doing half the time. It does make ski jumping seem like a very simple activity, though, particularly if you get a signal to jump.

There's also a fishing game that makes absolutely no sense to us; a game where you roll marbles down holes in a plate which I could do well and my sister and father can't at all; and a thing where you step on and off the pad with the directed beat. My father was a half-step behind the instructions pretty consistently. However, my mother's interest was raised by the discovery that since my sister had started running per Wii directions about half a year ago she's lost about ten pounds. She reports being exhausted and flopping in front of the air conditioner after that, but it's hard to argue something that gets you to exercise regularly with positive results.

Trivia: The first recorded instance of the Roman government interfering with salt prices dates to 506 BCE, three years before the Roman Kingdom gave way to the Roman Republic. Source: Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: Spectrum, Edited by Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest. You know, it is hard to read ``The Midas Plague'' --- in which there's just too much production for people to use --- without thinking of what it's like to have a solid reading habit and wide-ranging interests. I could use duplicates to do my reading for me.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

then crash horribly on the next even though I was doing the same work, sometimes drawing horrified looks from simulated Wii people

The agony of defeat!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Strongly in my mind, yes, and in my father's, although my sister somehow missed it.

[captpackrat.livejournal.com]

You should get We Ski. It uses the balance board (so you get the satisfaction of actually being able to use the $90 piece of equipment for more than just one game) and you do a lot more skiiiiiing than in the Wii Fit. It's actually rather addicting; the first time I played it I only stopped because my legs had turned to rubber.

Instead of just a single ski jump, you have an entire mountain to play on, with lifts, jumps, slaloms, moguls, other skiers to run into, and lots of mini games like orienteering, search-and-rescue and deliver-such-and-such-without-falling-down.

[tracerj.livejournal.com]

Wii Music will use the Balance Board as the pedals for a kick drum and hi-hat. I don't know if anything else is planned for it, however.

I will say that I'll be glad to have a game that uses the Balance Board but doesn't waffle on whether I'm overweight or obese just because I'm not some less-than-a-metre-and-a-half-tall hyperactive Japanese girl. Screw you, Wii Fit!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, if we're going into that then we have to ask why you aren't a less-than-a-meter-and-a-half-tall hyperactive Japanese girl? I mean, you've had the time to grow into it, you know.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, we wouldn't imagine getting the board just for the skiing. I don't know if there is a serious plan afoot to buy a Wii at all, actually. It would be hard to fit into the living room as it is, and into the parents' bedroom is right out.

Anyway, we tried out a variety of the activities that the fitness board or whatever it is allow; my sister even demonstrated the one where she just sits very still. I couldn't quite grok that one, maybe because I'm extremely good at sitting still. I'm not worried about it, really; I have the feeling the Wii wave is going to pass without affecting us.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

"It turned out that she had been talking about skiing on a Wii fitness device, and somehow I had missed critical nouns in that explanation."

I sense that more importantly, you misinterpreted a noun as a pronoun. "Wii Ski-Jumped." versu "We Ski-jumped." :)

My father and his GF bought a Nintendo Wii, and I got to play on their system. Sadly, they've managed to confine their video game purchases to "Whatever's under $20" for the most part, which hasn't resulted in them having any really good games except for Wii Sports.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's conceivable. I think what mostly happened is I was spending my main processing time on figuring out whether my sister's dog was ever going to call down and accept the fact of my existence, so that by the time I was listening to her again she was telling me how I should go on the ski jump.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

and then crash horribly on the next even though I was doing the same work

Oddly enough my wife and I were playing with a friend's Wii this weekend. The game in question was something called "WarioWare: Smooth Moves", in which you're presented a series of completely random "mini-games" which have to be accomplished *very quickly* and in rapid succession in order to advance. The "big twist" seemed to be that in addition to executing the motions proper you also have to hold the remote in the appropriate way to accomplish the on-screen task, holding it sideways as if it handlebars or a steering wheel (which were two subtly different grip positions), pinching it like a pencil, holding it flat in the palm, whatever.

Anyway, maybe we were too close to the screen or something (said friend had sort of a cramped little living room), but for whatever reason the Wii was *maddeningly* inconsistent in translating what seemed like the same action into the same response. The worst was a challenge where you had to balance a broom on an onscreen hand. One attempt might work perfectly, while on the next the hand would shoot at high speed off one side of the playing field. (Wait, the worst one was the thing where you had to bounce a ball on a tennis racket. No, wait, what about the one with the panda balancing on a beach ball? Or maybe... feh.)

So, don't feel bad about not being able to be consistent with the Wii. It's an interesting concept and all but I have a bad feeling that actually mastering whatever it wants from you would in the long term do irreparable damage to your muscle/motor memory. :^b

(Or it could be that it doesn't actually take any input from the remote at all, and what happens onscreen *is* entirely random. In which case playing it is an interesting exercise in fatalism.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That was a particular frustration with the slalom game too, actually. For the most part it seemed to want extremely subtle movements of the controller, but now and then it would decide it wanted me to throw it around the room. When I'd come off of a streak of making a dozen flags in a row without missing, this annoyed me. (My sister said she would just aim for one set of flags and accept missing half, so she was impressed that I actually simulated skiing.)