Nin­tendo Pro­vides Ring Fit Ad­ven­ture

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.