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MISHAWAKA, IN – Put on your exercise clothes, grab the nearest slightly-bendy gaming peripheral, and strap another gaming peripheral around your thigh, Pilots. It is time for Nintendo’s spiritual successor to “Wii Sports.”
This thinly veiled attempt by Nintendo to convince you they care about your health was released on Oct. 18 at $80. Featuring a ring-shaped controller and a thigh strap, this certainly is not your granddad’s exercise simulator. As far as mechanics go, players must use exercises to trigger contextualized actions in the game: knee lifts to sprint, squeezing the ring to fire projectiles, and stretching the ring to suck in collectibles. Every level consists of a different track to run, and every track has various items and entities with which to interact. In the stages, the character moves on rails, which is to say that the player only needs to move the character forward; all turns will be performed by the game itself according to the predesignated track.
Along the course, you will run into enemies that you need to either defeat or avoid. The combat system consists of more of the same contextualized actions. Compressing the ring, leg-lifts, and squatting will perform certain attacks, all of which depend on the situation. It is at this point I have come up with the tag line “feel the burn, and so will they,” and after typing it out, I have realized that it’s neither witty nor clever. Dipping back into our topic, I’m sure you see what I did there, one can easily see that if there are a bunch of grunt enemies, there must be a big, bad boss. There is one of those! A giant, jet-black dragon with biceps the size of two Dwayne Johnson’s. Don’t worry, though, because with the power of exercise, hydration, and a plastic ring you can fitness your way through the fight.
So, after completing roughly three levels, and lying on the ground downing water instead of snack cakes, for once, you might start to wonder if spending a good chunk of a paycheck on a glorified interactive exercise CD was worth it. ‘No,’ you’ll realize, shortly after you’ve thought of that question. ‘However,’ I would say to you in response, ‘now you can’t spend that money on junk food! Every cloud has a silver lining, right?’ Then I’d remember that you just spent $80 when you could go to any of the workout rooms on campus, which you’re already paying for. So, never mind, this one is pretty much all cloud.
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