The Wii Vitality Sensor could have more uses than you realise

Okay, perhaps ‘brilliant’ is pushing it. But Satoru Iwata’s surprise E3 peripheral doesn’t deserve its overwhelmingly negative post-E3 buzz.

Of course, it’s not intended as a traditional game application - Iwata spoke once again of the need to expand the gaming audience further, inviting new players to the fold. With the Wii increasingly being used in health research, this seems to be the logical next step.

I’ve been speaking to Tim Goodchild, who is a senior lecturer at University Campus, Suffolk, who agrees that despite something of a half-hearted introduction by Iwata - what, no software, Satoru? - it could be the next big thing for Wii.

“[there's] a general keeness on the part of healthcare and academia to support simple human computer interfaces and use current tech to support lifestyle. There is an huge amount of money being put forward to fund research into lifestyle and tech solutions - for example we are putting together a bid for to explore encouraging children to walk and measure how far they walk and link this to a virtual reward system/game.”

It’s obviously not too much of a stretch to think how Nintendo could use this sort of approach - indeed, with current DS title Walk With Me, it’s already exploring the idea of offering virtual rewards for physical activities, while the forthcoming Japanese versions of Pokémon Silver and Gold will come with a Pokéball-themed pedometer which allows players to level up their ‘Mon by running around.

So can the Wii market be expanded even further by positioning it as a genuinely useful healthcare tool? Goodchild certainly thinks so. “If you consider how popular Wii Fit is and the feeling from people that gaming may actually improve their lives, and then link in biometric readings, you have an actual ‘Wii Care’ system,” he explains, sorely tempting me to register said name. “By this I mean healthcare providers can monitor an individual as they try and improve their lifestyle by fun games, which we know are effective, and better their health - this could lead to health education/promotion programmes being linked to Wii.”

“This is a massive area,” Goodchild continues. “From cancer care to post surgery to coronary care - and especialy elderly care - these all require programmes to support individuals in recovery and maintenance. Also, the fact that we can monitor people through the vitality sensor makes this simple evidence-based research, and therefore has huge potential for further development.”

Ah, but what of more traditional game applications? Well, obviously there’s the possibility of relaxation improving in-game performance - the lower your pulse, the faster you run or the higher you fly - but I can definitely see some ideas in games which purposely try to raise your heart rate. Think of how effective the forthcoming Ju-On game could be if you were rewarded for how calm you remained during the scariest bits? Or a game which featured a lie detector test where you have to remain cool and collected in the face of interrogation? Or a stock-market sim like Capcom’s Kabu Trader Shun where you have to keep your pulse low while rapidly buying and selling in the pressure-cooker environment of the trading floor? And assuming the peripheral is a success, then a Wario Ware game where you have to regulate your pulse to prevent the games from reaching impossible speeds surely wouldn’t be too far off.

So while its primary uses would almost certainly be for non-gaming applications, perhaps the Wii Vitality Sensor shouldn’t be written off just yet. It’s a big ask, but if Nintendo can find the right piece of software to bundle with it, there’s no reason this can’t be the next Wii Fit.

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Anyone who has been inspired by Wii Music to learn a little more about creating songs would do well to purchase Nobilis’ forthcoming DS title, simply called Music. Out in April, the ‘edutainment’ release apparently lets you “play music in a FUN and EASY WAY!”

Unnecessary shouting aside, this could be a genuinely useful piece of software played in conjunction with Nintendo’s more freeform jam creator. Developed by Shiro Tsuji (a famous Japanese music teacher) this goes a little deeper than Wii Music’s fairly rudimentary approach to learning musical styles, tackling music theory in twenty-one separate lessons, with players tested on their knowledge in eighteen quick-fire quizzes. You’ll even be able to put your knowledge into practice, with a virtual piano and drum to tap away at, while Nobilis clearly hopes players will return to Music on a regular basis, with a built in ‘coach calendar’ to plot your progress to musical competence.

Hell, it might even make your Wii Music efforts a little less cacophonous, which can only be of benefit to those poor unfortunates who’ve had to suffer through twelve badly-played versions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

Apparently, there’s more to come on the game’s official . site, at www.music-thegame.com. So get clicking if you want to know more.

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Japanese Wii owners were this week given the opportunity to purchase a digital representation of the manga comic, Princess Ai - available on the Wii Shop Channel for 500 points courtesy of publisher SunSoft Books. The software uses the Wii remote to scroll through the pages, and further paid downloadable content will be available - initially the manga came in three volumes, so presumably the initial outlay is for the first, with the second and third available for extra Wii points.

There are two particular points of interest here. The first is that English subtitles are available throughout, though perhaps that’s not such a surprise when you discover the second reason this is interesting - the manga itself was co-created by none other than mildly bonkers rock widow Courtney Love.

The manga has a few parallels to Love’s own life - ‘ai’ is Japanese for ‘love’, while the amnesiac protagonist has a boyfriend named Kent, reportedly based on Love’s late husband, Nirvana singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain. Ai also owns a heart-shaped box - clearly a reference to the Nirvana song of the same name.

While the manga itself has been published in other countries, this is likely to remain in Japan, though it’s nice to have the option of English subtitles for a change. If only more Japanese titles gave English speakers the opportunity to enjoy them, too. Nintendo, please take note - oh, and offer us poor, underserved westerners downloadable subtitle packs for Another Code: R and Captain Rainbow while you’re at it, please.

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Books - knowledge-enhancing, life-enriching, train-journey-killing books. They might make you look pretty clever if you’ve got a hundred of the buggers lined up on your shelves, but unless you’re some kind of neat-freak, they’re bound to gather a fair bit of dust. To save those of us with mite allergies, Nintendo has teamed up with publisher HarperCollins to bring us 100: Classic Book Collection - as its name suggests, a collection of 100 classic books, which are all stored on the one thumbnail-sized cartridge. Technology be a wonderful thing, arrr.

(Sorry, I’ve been reading Treasure Island all day.)

It’s certainly a space saver, but is the DS really well suited to this sort of thing? Well, yes and no. It’s undoubtedly more convenient than lugging around a hundred novels, but there’s no real substitute for paper and print, and the DS screens don’t offer too many words per page - on the smallest font setting, Les Miserables runs to a whopping 11,600 pages. Myopics can increase the text size, but that ups the page count to 17,938. It’s a good job Tolstoy isn’t represented, really.

Still, given the DS’s limitations, developer Genius Sonority has done a pretty good job here. You can simply rifle through the virtual bookshelf by swiping the stylus to either side, then tap to select the novel you want. If you’re unsure what to go for, then you can choose to be asked a series of questions to see which title suits your mood. If it suggests MacBeth, then your mates will know it’s probably not the best day to ask you for that fiver back.

From Adam Bede to Wuthering Heights, there’s a decent mix of genres covered, though the selection is fairly safe. You won’t find any Catcher In the Ryes, 1984s or Clockwork Oranges here, while Shakespeare seems a little over-represented. But then again, these are all titles where copyright has expired, so we were hardly going to get modern classics like The Road or Jordan: A Whole New World.

If you’ve got an iPhone, you might be better off with an e-reader, with which you can grab hold of a much larger selection of titles, with plenty available legitimately for download if you know where to look. But does that give you ambient background noise of parks and train journeys to listen to as you flick through hundreds of virtual pages with your stylus? Nope. There’s even a neat virtual bookmark which saves your place.

Once you’re done with each tome, you can review it with a star rating and pick from a series of words which best represent your feelings on what you just read. You can then upload your rankings via the Wi-Fi connection, which also allows you to download a further 10 novels to add to your already-impressive collection.

It’s certainly well-presented, and at around £19 is fairly attractively-priced. Libraryphobes will find this a worthwhile purchase - others might just prefer the pleasures of a well-thumbed, dog-eared paperback.

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The long tail has wagged. Wii Music had a sizeable sales spike for the holiday season, perhaps helped by positive word-of-mouth by those who’d actually spent more than five minutes playing the game. Though comfortably the least-successful Wii-branded game so far, it managed to comfortably outsell Sony’s great white hope LittleBIGPlanet in the month of November, with almost 300,000 Americans shaking their maracas to Miyamoto’s latest slice of casual genius.

Meanwhile, plenty of those pounds piled on over Thanksgiving will soon be shifted, with Wii Fit selling nearly 700,000 copies to hit number four, while people invited more plastic peripherals into their houses as Mario Kart Wii and Wii Play (with added remote) sandwiched Nintendo’s health-booster at five and three respectively.

Worthy of note is the performance of Guitar Hero World Tour - the Wii SKU being the only one to make it into the top ten, rocking a total just 25k shy of half a million copies. Impressive. Most impressive.

COGs and COD were the other big winners, with Treyarch’s WWII shooter being pipped by Epic’s third-person, er, epic to top spot, both on 360. Well, those Americans do love bigger, better and more badass.

Once again, glance below to see the full rundown.

1. Gears of War 2 - Xbox 360 – Microsoft – 1.56M
2. Call of Duty: World at War - Xbox 360 – Activision – 1.41M
3. Wii Play w/ remote - Wii – Nintendo – 796K
4. Wii Fit - Wii – Nintendo – 697K
5. Mario Kart - Wii – Nintendo – 637K
6. Call of Duty: World at War - PS3 – Activision – 597K
7. Guitar Hero: World Tour - Wii – Activision – 475K
8. Left 4 Dead - Xbox 360 – EA – 410K
9. Resistance 2 - PS3 – Sony – 385K
10. Wii Music - Wii – Nintendo – 297K

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Right, then. I finally got round to uploading some videos of my Wii Music compositions. Above is version one of John Lennon’s ‘Woman’ which I recorded a few weeks ago. Yesterday, I did another, very different take -with one instrument remaining the same - just to compare and contrast, and to show how you can change the feel of a song by the way it’s performed. See below.

To some people this is still going to seem like a load of old rubbish, but hopefully one or two of you will be inspired to pick up Wii Music after seeing just what you can do when you put your mind to it. Not for nothing is it in my top five games of the year…

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The latest issue of industry bible Edge slapped onto subscriber doormats this morning, and if you’re not a regular reader then consider this a recommendation to pick up a copy when it reaches newsstands next Thursday. As you can probably tell by glancing at the pic above, the key feature is a lengthy interview with Shigeru Miyamoto in which he talks about Wii Music, the educational nature of software and bridging the gap between casual and hardcore gamers, among other subjects.

Asked what he wants to be remembered for when he retires, Miyamoto offers the following statement:

“I would be happiest if people look back some day and say this is somebody who was continually creating new styles of play and was bringing new ideas to games and was a pioneer up until his dying day.”

Well said, Shigs. The rest of the interview is a fascinating read too - with some interesting observations on the potential future of Wii, and of its controller and how the Wii MotionPlus could change the type of games we see on Wii.  There’s also a single-page critique of Wii Music, which is generally very positive, suggesting it is “crafted beautifully for the masses”. Whether the masses realises this is open to debate, but hopefully it will become the word-of-mouth success it so deserves to be.

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Electronic Arts today announced details of EA Sports Active - essentially EA’s own take on Wii Fit, but it’s actually much more interesting than that.

Far from just a straight clone, EA Sports Active looks to provide a different kind of fitness experience to Wii Fit - and all without requiring the Balance Board (though the peripheral is supported).

It’s clear that EA has spent some significant time on R&D with this, as the press blurb and accompanying video proves. Rather than provide a series of disconnected exercises, in EA Sports Active you’ll be able to specify targeted workouts - used to focus on whichever area of your body needs the most work. While there aren’t as many activities as in Wii Fit (”over twenty” EA claims) it seems they’ll be more varied, and will be supplemented by regular downloads.

Intriguingly, it’s bundled with two peripherals - a resistance band which you place under your feet to make bicep curls and the like more difficult, and two leg straps, used to attach the nunchuk to your leg so the software can recognise your full body movement instead of just your arms. (The spare is so another player can join in simultaneously.)

It promises full one-to-one body movement, thirty day custom exercise plans, and the option for new peripherals for future exercises. Evidently EA sees this as more platform than game, with a ‘football version’ planned for release at a later stage. There’s a packed-in nutrition book, and it’s all endorsed by Bob Greene, personal trainer to Oprah Winfrey.

So yes, this is going to be big. It’s certainly one of the most intriguing forthcoming prospects on Wii, and from the sounds of things could provide a more thorough and effective workout than Wii Fit. And it’s out in March, so we’ve not too long to wait to see whether Nintendo has indeed been beaten at its own game.

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Wii Music is the slowest selling of all the major Wii-branded titles Nintendo has released to date - in Japan, at least. While no-one really expected it to compete with Sports and Play, despite blanket coverage on Japanese TV, it shifted only 92,000 copies - enough to top the charts, but far short of Wii Fit’s quarter-of-a-million sales in its launch week.

Touch Generations titles like Wii Music tend to sell steadily over some time, though, so the next few weeks will tell whether the Japanese have taken to it or whether it’s Nintendo’s first serious misstep in courting the expanded audience.

Meanwhile, Rhythm Tengoku Gold has hit the magic million mark - gratifying in a way, though it’s a shame to see it perform so much better than its significantly superior predecessor. The full chart is below.

01. [WII] Wii Music (Nintendo) 92,000 / NEW
02. [NDS] Pokémon Platinum (Pokémon) 72,000 / 1,754,000
03. [PSP] Yuusha no Kuse ni Namaikida Or 2 (Sony) 59,000 / NEW
04. [NDS] Rhythm Tengoku Gold (Nintendo) 51,000 / 1,010,000
05. [NDS] Culdcept DS (SEGA) 50,000 / NEW
06. [PS2] Kidou Senshi Gundam 00: Gundam Meisters (Namco Bandai) 43,000 / NEW
07. [PS2] Shin Sangoku Musou 5 Special (KOEI) 27,000 / 184,000
08. [PSP] Macross Ace Frontier (Namco Bandai) 26,000 / 130,000
09. [WII] Wii Fit (Nintendo) 18,000 / 2,740,000
10. [PS2] Super Robot Wars Z (Namco Bandai) 13,000 / 462,000

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Good to see one pro site at least which is treating Wii Music with the respect it deserves. After its positive review of the non-game recently (it got an A-), writer Jeremy Parish has written a terrific blog entry, explaining why it doesn’t deserve the scorn poured on it by internet-goers (and, indeed, other websites).

” I’m impressed by the substance and depth hidden beneath the simplistic surface — there’s a lot of musical nuance to the game, or toy, or whatever you want to call it — yet while I can say I like Wii Music, it’s not at all the sort of thing I’d want to play myself,” Parish begins.

“But it’s the worst kind of solipsism to call something a failure simply because it’s not my sort of thing” he argues. “I mean, I have no intention of playing Dead Space, because survival horror bores me to tears as a genre — and I’d be an idiot to say it’s a bad game, because clearly it’s not. It’s a good game that simply doesn’t hold any interest for me, and I’m far beyond the point of expecting games to cater strictly to my interests or of forcing myself to try to enjoy things for which I have no taste. This is a good thing! It means that gaming has grown and diversified enough that no one need be expected to experience or appreciate everything to come down the pipeline.”

I needn’t really add anything more, suffice to say if you’d like to read more wise words, click on the link above and prepare to be enlightened.

Wii Music is out in the US and Japan now, and will hit these shores on November 14th. I’ll be reviewing it very soon once I’ve spent some time with the English-language version.

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