Wiiiiiii!!!

A lady named Amanda Flowers in Great Britain is, errr... blaming Nintendo's Wii Fit for causing her to have persistent orgasms.

From the article at the Daily Star...

A WOMAN has gone from Nintendo to nympho after a fall from her Wii Fit board turned her into a sex addict.

Randy Amanda Flowers needs 10 sex sessions a day after the slip-up.

And now the slightest of vibrations, from mobile phones to food processors, turns her on.

The catering worker said: "It began as a twinge down below before surging through my body. Sometimes it built up into a trembling orgasm."

A doctor diagnosed her with persistent sexual arousal syndrome due to a damaged nerve.

Probably a million-to-one thing that happened to Amanda Flowers and likely not easily replicated (no matter how many people will attempt it, no doubt). I found this interesting enough to post 'cuz I've some fascination with video gaming and human biology.

This just happens to be the first time that I've heard of a video game affecting one's sex life (apart from some examples that will readily come to mind :-P)

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A cool (and free) technical idea for the Nintendo Wii

This morning I was having a workout on Wii Fit (here's my initial review). My personal regimen right now is some strength training, some yoga and a lot of hard aerobic activity, followed by the "fun" stuff like the Ski Jump. That and the Ski Slalom might be the most addictive activities of the entire package... but Lisa swears that Bubble River will have you just as hooked.

Part of the aerobics that I'm doing right now is Jogging the long distance. It's really clever how this works: you don't use the Wii Balance Board at all. You just put the Wii Remote in your pocket (or if your pants lack pockets you can just hold the Remote in your hand) and then you start jogging in place. If you keep a brisk pace while swinging your arms in good wide circles you can work up a serious sweat. And all the while, the Wii is picking up your relative speed by how much the Remote in your pocket or hand jiggles about.

It's this use of the Wii's sensing technology that got me thinking...

Imagine a first-person shooter game like Doom or Halo for the Wii. Imagine having one Wii Remote that you use to aim like a gun at whatever it is on screen that you intend to shoot at. Now imagine two other Wii Remotes, one in each side pocket of a pair of pants that you are wearing. And to play the game you have to literally run through the map shooting at whatever bad guys there are while running and possibly even ducking for cover. The Wii will be picking up all of this movement as you play, including changes in body position and change of direction/speed (your velocity) as you run through the map. It would be like putting yourself directly in a game such as Gears of War... but instead of using a standard hand-held controller, your entire body - from your toes to your trigger finger - would control your in-game persona.

Can you imagine how much fun that would be? To say nothing of the workout that a person would be getting while probably not even realizing it.

There would be a few minor drawbacks for such a system though, but I think those might be fairly negligible. The most obvious is that to work like this the player must own three Wii Remotes. And there could be no multiplayer per this system. But with some minor tweaking, Nintendo programmers or whatever other company that makes this game could add the option of playing with only one Wii Remote along with a gun accessory and the Nunchuk add-on, and then possibly four players could do this at the same time. Or one Wii Remote could be placed in a pocket and pick up running while the Nunchuk controls movement and the Wii Remote operates aiming and firing, in which case two friends really could be running around shooting at each other.

That might even rival Boxing on Wii Sports for two-player fun on the Nintendo Wii!

If anyone at Nintendo or some other video game studio reads this and wants to play with it, feel free to do so. I'm not looking for any compensation for the idea. It just seemed like too neat a concept to not put out there and see if somebody could work with it. If this ever does become a Wii game, I would absolutely be the first in line to buy a copy (provided that everything else in the game was well-designed too, like the engine and graphics and sound and the story, etc. :-).

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How much is that doggie in the Wii-ndow?

For Christmas I got Lisa a Nintendo Wii. Had to camp out all night during cold rain in front of a GameStop store the week before to get it (this was when they had the vouchers thing going, and I wound up getting a Wii for Lisa and a Wii voucher for my sister, who got hers a little over a week after Christmas ... am I a great husband/brother or what? :-)

Along with the Wii I bought a card worth 2000 Wii Points, to spend on extra games or whatever through Nintendo's online store for the Wii. And until now we hadn't used it at all (guess we've been having too much fun with everything else on the Wii). So yesterday I loaded up the points and "went shopping", and even though it cost 500 points I thought it would be neat to have the Internet Channel installed. This is a version of the Opera browser customized for the Wii, that lets you surf the web (kinda like WebTV).

The Internet Channel for Wii is pretty neat. The first thing I went to was this blog (of course!) and then Lisa's and a few friends' sites. Then I went to Flickr. Why? Because I wanted to see if there were any new pictures of a certain girl...

A year ago I discovered Taci, an unbelievably cute cocker spaniel whose owner Kalen loves to take pictures of her and post on Flickr. Taci looks almost exactly like Bridget, our cocker spaniel who sadly passed away way too young some years ago. Kalen is quite a talented photographer and she's captured Taci in so many sweet (and often funny) poses and expressions. The pic above is one of the latest that Kalen has taken of Taci. So I zoomed-in with the Wii Remote and took this photo of Taci's face on a 37-inch high-definition television set via the Wii! Kalen thought it was hilarious (and hopefully so did Taci :-).

By the way, that might be the last photo that I post on this blog of our high-def TV: the one that I've been referring to as "The Behemoth" ever since we got it a little over a year ago. You can't see it in this photo but there's something wrong with the screen that looks like it's been a manufacturing defect (that's not a reflection on the company that made it by any means, these things just happen every so often). We tried to get it fixed but it's not really feasible, so next week the retailer is giving us another high-def television, one that might be even better. Thank goodness we got the service plan for this thing. But still, I've grown quite fond of The Behemoth. So before it went away I wanted to post a photo of it displaying something beautiful for a change, as opposed to, say, Gears of War :-P

And if you want to see more of "Taci the Wonder Spaniel", scamper over to this link!

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Rock Band coming to the Wii, BUT ...

... it won't have downloaded content or online play.

Harmonix announced today that the wildly popular music game will be released for the Nintendo Wii on June 22. It will have five "bonus" songs. This supposedly is in lieu of the online play feature and ability to download new songs that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions already have.

A lot of people will be glad to know that Rock Band is getting ported to the Wii. But how long is that going to last when these details about the release become widely known? To exclude the downloadable content feature and online play is an insanely bad move by Harmonix. From a business standpoint, it makes no sense at all! Nintendo Wii is the best-selling video game system on the market today, consistently outpacing both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Now bear in mind that for those two systems already, Harmonix has sold over 6 million copies of new tracks that have been made available since the game's launch in November.

Obviously, the downloadable content is one of Rock Band's most popular points. Harmonix is courting disaster by consciously stripping it from the Wii edition. They aren't just going to be losing millions of dollars in potential profit from lack of downloaded tracks, but a lot of Wii owners - and I'm one of them - are going to see this move as petty at best, and outright insulting at worst.

Besides, there is no reason at all why the Wii could not support either the downloaded content or online play for Rock Band. It can save tracks to an SD card, and I'm sure that some kind of encryption/encoding scheme is possible that would prevent tracks from being illegally copied. Technically, the online capabilities of Rock Band could certainly be shared with the Wii version. So why aren't they?

The suits at Harmonix had best reconsider, and announce that the downloaded content and online play are going to be in the Wii version too. Or else they're going to wind up with tons of unwanted Rock Band for Wii boxes that'll take up a hella lot more space in a landfill than those E.T. cartridges ever did.

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Those insane courses on Wii Sports: Golf

This afternoon Dad came by. It's been raining here for most of the day, and it was pretty chilly out in his knife shop and he'd wanted to take a break from his work, and I needed one from some projects too. So we played a nine-hole round of Golf on Wii Sports on the Nintendo Wii that I got Lisa for Christmas.

How did we do?

Let's put it this way: if Robert Trent Jones ever designed a golf course as evil as the ones on Wii Sports: Golf, he would have probably been dragged out onto the fairway and shot.

We were doing pretty good until the ninth hole. If you've played Golf on Wii Sports you probably know which one I'm about to talk about: it's that one where the hole is in the middle of a rocky island, that you have to drive the ball onto. Dad and I both tried our darndest to get it onto the green... but it's impossible! The ball either goes into the water, or it ricochets off the cliff-side and then goes into the water. By the time each of us had hit +12 on the hole the game told us to "Give Up".

Somewhere at Nintendo Headquarters in Japan, some smart-alecy game programmer is no doubt laughing at his supposed cleverness for creating the golfing equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru "no-win" scenario.

Okay so anyone else who has this game: how the heck do we get the ball over the water and onto that tiny island??

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Wii are family: The things I do for the women in my life

It's now almost 2 weeks since Christmas, and Lisa is happily playing her new Nintendo Wii.

Yes folks, we have a Wii. And my sister does too!

How did it happen? The Thursday night before Christmas, I went to a GameStop store in Greensboro, where they were due to begin selling vouchers the next day for the Wii (which might have been the hottest item of Christmas 2007). The plan was that you buy the voucher, and your Wii comes in on January 25th. I figured hey, if it's 4 weeks after Christmas that's still okay.

So I got to the store, and lo and behold the nice associates told me that they had some Wiis in stock, that they were going to start selling the next morning.

"I'm not going anywhere," I told them. "I'm gonna be camping outside all night until you guys open tomorrow morning, if that's okay." They said it was fine, and after they left for the night they told me to stay warm and dry (it wasn't quite freezing, but it was cold and due to rain as the night progressed).

I was alone until about 1 a.m. that Friday morning, when another dude who'd come into the store that night arrived to also camp out so that he could get a Wii for his 9-year old son. A few hours later we were joined by two ladies (including one who was getting a Wii for her 67-year old father). Over the course of the next several hours, a few others arrived. The last on the scene before the store opened was a guy from Eden who told us that he and his wife had hit every store between Winston-Salem and Raleigh trying to find a Wii for his grandson.

Just after 8:30 a.m., the GameStop associate who had come to open the store told us that he could start taking us one at at a time, and that they had 11 Wiis that they could sell. And it just so happened that there were exactly 11 people waiting to buy a Wii in line. I was the first through the door, bought the Wii, and exited amid much cheering from my fellow campers! The grandfather from Eden bought the last one.

As soon as I had Lisa's Wii in my car trunk, I got back in line to get a voucher for my sister (they were limiting Wii purchases to one per person, the same with the vouchers). Even these were limited in number. I bought the voucher, and a few days later put it in a small box, wrapped that, and then put it in a series of several other wrapped boxes. When Anita finally got them all open on Christmas morning, there was a Wii voucher for her. But she didn't have to wait so long for it to be redeemed. A few days later, her Wii had already arrived. I delivered it to her during this past weekend.

So how is it? I haven't had much chance to use it so far, 'cuz I've been so busy with other things. But the Nintendo Wii might be the most immersive, challenging and fun video game system that I've ever played with. Lisa is absolutely loving Super Mario Galaxy, and I'm having a ball with Wii Sports (the Boxing game really gives you a strenuous workout!). The Wii also connects to the Internet via our wireless router, and you can check out news and weather when it's on, and even buy new games (that are saved on an SD flash card) through an online Nintendo store. I think Anita was really looking forward to playing with her Wii too: she's a physical therapy doctor, and she's been reading a lot of material about how the Wii is an excellent therapeutic tool.

The Wii wasn't the only video game system we ended up with for Christmas: through circumstances beyond my control (though I'm not regretting it at all), we also received an Xbox 360. So now I can finally play Halo 3 and see how that story wraps up (the ending of Halo 2 is still one of the most frustrating things I've ever seen in any video game). It also came with the Xbox 360 version of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which I played on the original Xbox last year and it became one of my favorite video games ever. I think Lisa wants us to get Rock Band sometime so that we can jam in our living room, especially when we have friends over.

Now if I can only figure out which system I want to play Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on when it comes out in a few months. Gotta admit: the Wii's ability to swing a lightsaber makes that version pretty tempting... :-)

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