Endless Ocean

posted by Jaitu at 16:47

Endless Ocean was released on the Wii earlier this year. I read the Edge Magazine review of it and thought I'd give it a go. Unfortunately although it was listed at most retailers none of them seemed to have any stock of it. I had all but forgotten obout the title until Doug emailed me saying he had found somewhere that had it and did I still want a copy. At only twenty quid I said yes.
As the IGN video review below says this is almost a non-game. The object is to travel around a fictional sea and catalogue the creatures you discover. Along the way you will receive requests to guide other divers to particular species, supply photographs of a given subject or go hunting for lost relics. The only thing I'd add to the video review is that last night I decided to give it 'a quick first look' and didn't stop playing until more than three hours later and really only then because it was the early hours of a new day and I was in need of a comfort break and some sleep.

No More Heroes: Still More Heroes

posted by Jaitu at 08:02

I thought I'd give the Wii a bit of exercise other than for Wii Fit so I dug out No More Heroes again. Doug and I gave this game it's first airing when it was first released but then somehow neither of us played it again until this last week.
No More Heroes has a particularly stylised appearance with a harsh, sometimes ugly, cell shaded effect.
The back story is that you are Travis Touchdown a guy that really is an otaku loser who likes to kill. The main drive is to work your way up through an assassins league by buying your way into a series of contests where you meet successively higher ranked opponents and dispatch them to take their place on the roster. The counterpoint to these fights are the mundane jobs you must take on to earn the entrance fees for the fights. So far the jobs I've encountered are collecting coconuts, mowing lawns and picking up garbage. You can also take on violent missions for cash rewards.
Travis got into the assassination game after winning an online auction for a 'Beam Katana' which is essentially a light sabre. The control scheme is fairly straight forward. Use the thumb stick on the nun chuck to run around. Pound the 'A' button to slash at enemies with the Beam Katana and when prompted flick the Wiimote in the given direction to perform a finishing move. There are lots of other little control touches that keep things interesting and it's a decent solution. When your mobile phone rings during the game the sound comes from the speaker on the Wiimote and the conversation is held while hold the it up to your ear.
There is a great deal of humour to the game, much of it in the odd category. Saving your progress is done by using the toilet in Travis' apartment.
The biggest frustration for me is the running around between missions. Travis rides an enormous motorbike - think a combination of the bike from Akira and a Sinclair C5 - between locations in the town of Santa Destroy. The town is the least appealing thing in the game. It is rendered in a very basic style and sparsely populated. In order to take part time jobs you must ride to one place, to take missions another, to work out another, to save the game another, to deposit the cash to enter the next ranked round another. Then to actually start your jobs or your missions you must ride to yet further locations. The riding is dull and offers nothing to engage with. Worse still every building you enter or exit requires a short but annoyingly frequent load time. Most annoying is that every second location (taking a job or a mission) sees you in the buildings for only a moment but needs the load time to enter and then leave to the game world each time.
When in the combat this game is actually pretty great but the lulls between the action is enough to make it an effort to return to.

Wii Fit Begins

posted by Jaitu at 07:44

Yesterday morning I picked up Wii Fit and last night after a warm-up consisting of some gentle painting and decorating we cracked it open and gave it a go. After the initial setup of the Wii Fit board (press a button on the board and a button on the console to sync them) it's time to register yourself with the software.
Choose your Mii or create a new one and the system will ask you for your height and date of birth. Then you're asked to remove your shoes and socks and step onto the board. The software then measures your centre of gravity and weight showing a graphical representation of your natural balance and BMI (Body Mass Index).
My balance turned out to be nearly perfect with Left/Right weight distribution of 49.7%/50.3%. If anything my COG (Centre Of Gravity) was a little to the back but otherwise the result surprised me. Something that didn't surprise me so much was my BMI. I weighed in at 14st 6lbs which put me in the 'Overweight' category on the BMI chart. Interestingly the software recorded me at around 4lbs heavier then both our bathroom scales and the scales in our hotel room a fortnight ago so I'm taking the result with a pinch of salt. The important thing will be how my weight changes relative to this first reading and not so much the actual figure. The software then rescales your Mii to match the reading, making mine significantly wider around the middle. A basic balance test asking you to shift your weight and hold it in certain positions for a fixed period then allows your Wii Fit Age to be calculated. I have an initial WFA of 42, 8 years older than my real age.
You can also set yourself a goal for your training. My chosen goal is to lose 1st8lbs in 6 months to get me into the 'Ideal' BMI range. This should be easy to achieve and the goal can be tweaked depending on how you progress. The actual training is made up of a variety of activities divided into four categories - Muscle, Balance, Aerobic and Yoga. Four or five of each are available when you first begin and you choose which ones you want to do and in what order. Each one you do earns you Fit Cash (measured in minutes) and is not dependant on how well you do but how long you do. The more time you spend in the activities the more new activities become available to you. The overall presentation of the package is incredibly straight forward and friendly.
I'm going to try and do at least 10 minutes a day and hopefully 30 or more and I'll track my progress here. I'll also talk more about the individual activities in further posts.