So aside from being passive-aggressive with its advice and cranky when you don’t call, Wii Fit is now mixing stuff up on me, to keep things interesting, I guess. Here are two changes that happened yesterday:
Wii Fit instructor
When I started my Yoga exercises for the day, I started with an exercise I don’t do very often. When it started, instead of my vaguely-Norwegian pony-tailed dude whom I think of as Hans, I had the creepy globe-boobed female instructor; for some reason, I find the female much creepier than the man, though they both have the distinct look of a mannequin come to life. Andrew McCarthy wouldn’t have been so hot for Kim Cattrall if she’d kept her plaster-white skin and plastic-molded face. Anyhow, before the exercise started, she says to me:
I hope you don’t mind, but I’ll be filling in as your instructor today.
I was a little weirded out. What, is Hans sick? It would have been awesome if she’d said he had a virus. Ha ha. It went fine — she gives the same contradictory advice that my Hans does:
Your legs are a little shaky. Concentrate on straightening your spine.
[a moment passes]
You have great balance!
Then, just as I’ve made peace with having a different instructor for today, Hans is back. I guess he just was just stuck in traffic or something.
Wii fit jogging
2. There’s a jogging game that measures the movement of the Wiimote as you run in place. It’s moderately fun as you move around the scenic island. You follow a friend who tries to keep you from having an uneven pace. Yesterday, instead of running with me the whole way, my buddy got lazy and outsourced his leading job. His replacement, a dog.
The dog took over the pace setting and led me for a lovely run along the beach instead of the usual path. Most amusing was the real dog-ness of the character. At one point, another runner passes us and the dog’s head turns as though he’s pondering chasing them. He stuck to his job and led me across the finish line, though. Good boy.
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I have found that if you accidentally outpace your pacemaster that he/she is replaced by the dog.
1. I too find the instructors creepy. My wife wanted Wii Fit so badly, but all I’d seen was shots of the washed-out android coaches in front of their blue screen, and I kept saying no. It wasn’t till I learned that some of the games could use Miis that I finally agreed to it. Just the same, the trainers still creep me out. (And it still pisses me off that the games and tests don’t give you enough information to score well. The demos on the strength exercises and yog positions should include how and if you’re going to be measured. It sucks to be down in Triangle pose with your head aimed at the ceiling when you suddenly realize (from an audio beep) that there’s some sort of important bar-graph balance feedback happening on the screen. Pisses me off!
2. I second what J’Rob said. When it says “I notice your pace is increasing, try keeping it at a 60% pace” you’ll notice a dog enter the screen a couple seconds later. If you push the pace up faster at that point, it’ll transfer you to the dog. If this happens early enough in your run, the dog will take you on a different path to a completely different goal line. I suspect each “course” has more than one spot where the dog can divert to a new path, depending on how soon you summoned the dog, but I have yet to test that theory.
I did three different runs today to put my theory to the test. Turns out I was completely wrong. The dogs show up at predetermined points, and it has nothing to do with going too fast. For whatever reason, I just have a tendency to speed up shortly before those points, so I thought it was related.
When a dog is on screen, running faster will switch you over to dog-running mode, but going fast when a dogisn’t on screen won’t summon one.
Thanks for figuring this out, and running so much!
You and I think my research was great – but my downstairs neighbors beg to differ.
More research – I started an Island Lap, and there was a yellow dog at the very beginning, so I dove in with gusto, and it said “now follow the dog”.
Like a second later, a dark brown dog appeared on the screen, passing the yellow dog, so I sped up. It said “now follow the new dog”.
And just a couple seconds later, a white dog passed that one, so I sped up again. “Now follow the new dog” it said again. The white dog lead me around in circles and into a courtyard that felt like it was the secret kingdom of the dogs – there were a dozen dogs just sitting in that courtyard. Then the white dog lead me across fields, completely skipping (or cutting briefly across) all the roads and paths in favor of grassy hillsides.
It was cool.
I never tried yoga in my wiifit, i always have my weekend tournaments
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