Don't You Worry

I'm going to lay this out right now, I am an xbox fan. I personally have an Xbox 360 and I prefer that system over the Playstation. But the system I'm going to talk about today is the Wii, the black sheep of the gaming family. Now don't get me wrong, I love nintendo, the gameboy (I got a gameboy colour in yellow at the age of seven), and the gamecube (my original multiplayer gaming device). But it's not exactly impressive, though perhaps with the addition of Wii U it is? I've never tried it so I wouldn't know personally. The only reason that I have access to a Wii is because my mom wanted to use it for exercise as she doesn't like playing video games. Personally, I love using the Kinect with Zumba: Fitness Rush or Dance Central for my video game exercise but I thought I'd give her Wii a shot. If you can't tell, I love to dance and those are games that make it entertaining. What does the Wii have? Wii Fitness or Wii Active, that already sounds less appealing than the Xbox's games. I plugged in her Wii and the controllers are dead because she hasn't used it in so long. I wasted some time getting myself a glass of water because its June and my house is really quite hot, plus obviously I assumed I'd get thirsty. Exciting stuff, right? Anyway, by the time I'm done with that the controller works, so I put the disk in and have to register my mii or something. Not sure how that works, I already have a girl in a yellow shirt that vaguely resembles me if you squint a lot. With a little animated cartoon person, its hard to get it to resemble you and frankly their pants are creepy. My avatar on Xbox looks just like me, except I can never find hair that's long enough to resemble mine. Do people on playstation have things like Avatars or Mii's? I honestly don't know.

I took the body test the first time and it told me that I have terrible balance, which I don't think I have but perhaps that test was just not my forte. Overall, my wii fit age was 20 which is two years less than I am so that's a positive right? The game is separated into four categories (not including your favourite games). The first day, yesterday, I tried the Yoga and Aerobic Exercise categories, though today I changed it up by trying the Balance Games and Muscle Workouts. My best activities were whatever ones involved lunges, but I don't recall their names. I'd get the full stars on those, whereas on the balance ones I'd get one or two stars. I clearly need to work on my crane style, but since it's a first try I know that I will get better as I work on it. I love the Aerobic Exercises category because it allows you to hula hoop and I'm kind of a pro at that.

When I was in elementary school, I was not able hula hoop but my cousins and I were going to have a birthday party together. The three of us all have March birthdays, so occasionally we did that. Our parents rented this hall, we had a bouncy house, and *drumroll please* a hula hooping contest. As my older cousin is the best at everything, including hula hooping, I knew that I had to learn. That was probably the most dedicated I've been to anything in my entire life, its quite ridiculous. I practiced until I was able to hula hoop indefinitely, or so I think, I have hula hooped for over an hour until I got bored and stopped. To my knowledge, I would only stop if I became tired or bored not because I couldn't sustain it any longer. The day of the birthday party, I proudly stepped up to the man hosting the hula hooping contest and joined in. The final two in it honestly ended up being my cousin and myself, and I won. The little six or seven year old me so was excited, though he wasn't.

So of course, when I see a game that lets me hula hoop I'm going to do that at least four times before I try some other activities. I mean, I hula hooped in my school cafeteria one day with my friends because they were hosting a carnival - and hey what else do you do during a carnival in your cafeteria? It strange because I had to swing my hips first to the left, then to the right. Right feels unnatural to me when I actually hula hoop, but its not weird when its fake. Then the little miis throw more hoops at you until you're doing over 400 revolutions per direction in a minute and a half. I'm not sure how they calculate it, though I expect each hoop it one revolution by the five or six hoops you're balancing, it can add up fairly quickly. According to this wii record site, the record is 346 revolutions (obviously not nintendo posting these, just people so I'm sure it's higher.) If that's close to the record, perhaps I should register to keep track and challenge myself.

I feel like I've talking about hula hoops for an excessive amount of time, so back to the other games. I tried the running and it was cute but awkward with the wii remote on my person. The skiing was absolutely embarrassing, I missed about six of the maybe twenty flags I had to get between. If I focus, I'm good at doing something, but once I make a mistake I get flustered and take a couple of seconds to recover. The soccer was confusing because I'd hit most of them, then the players would throw shoes and pandas at me. Who wants a round squishy panda thrown at them? I'm sure a lot of people do, but that's besides the point. I'd lean into things (and as we've established, my balance is not my best feature) and either lean too far or not enough. I was hit by cleats quite a few times and though its not real, its confusing.

So the moral of my story is that you should give Wii Fitness a chance, its actually pretty fun. I think I'm going to make a goal to get on it everyday for however long I can maintain it. If I still enjoy it after a few weeks, maybe I'll invest in something else if Wii even makes anything else. Do they make Wii Fitness 2 or one with extra games? I'm woefully uneducated about the Wii Nintendo-verse.