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The Gym Arcade
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Nov 02, 2008 05:37 PM
from the exertainment dept.
from the exertainment dept.
theodp writes "Cross Halo with an exercise bike, and you get Expresso Fitness' S3, which lets you blow away dragons by squeezing handlebar-mounted triggers as you pedal hard through the Chinese countryside. Portfolio notes that a new generation of Wii-like workouts is hitting gyms and homes, with companies like GameRunner incorporating treadmills into First Person Shooters and Kickstart offering mini steppers and cycles for popular game systems."
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Cue the "where are MY games" whining (Score:3, Insightful)
The crowd that has labeled themselves the "hardcore" gamers is going to be upset about this. Innovation in games and getting new people interested in gaming drives the improvement of games directly and indirectly, both because as the market gets bigger, people start taking games more seriously and putting more effort into them and directly because more money from wider releases means more development money for future projects. There are people upset gaming moved out of 16 bit, people who still think final fantasy sold out when they made the leap to the 3rd dimension. Not sure why they don't realize there are still games being made for them, there are just additional games now. I guess they'd prefer to have all games released explicitly for them even if it meant they never got any better.
Just a few observations. "Casual" gamer interest is improving games, not degrading them.
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"The crowd that has labeled themselves the "hardcore" gamers is going to be upset about this."
Cue "hardcore are the sux" troll. No one is going to be upset about this, the hardcore is not "upset" about gaming becoming more mainstream. In fact MANY hardcore gamers are behind the push of "exer-gaming", many hardcore gamers have had the thought about combining gaming with their exercise. I know because I used to do it, it's the whole reason many of us got a DS or gameboy advance - you can sit on a exercise
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This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls.
Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax. If not, then I have to applaud you on the spinjob there.
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"Go to gamefaqs.com sometime, the wii boards, if you honestly think it's a hoax"
These sites are not representative of the gaming community at large, they are anecdotal at best. Not only that, but most hardcore gamers are older then the whiny peeps you find at gamefaqs and the wii boards. You have a minority of whiny people who know shit all about gaming, If they have even been with gaming since the 80's or earlier. Remember only people who have something to whine about will post, so you get a disproport
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Right, but it's proof that your statement "This false idea that the hardcore are all anti-casual gamer is a bunch of bullshit pedalled by internet trolls," is not correct. There ARE people who call themselves hardcore that are upset at what they call "casual."
Those people are idiots who are not representative of the gaming community, I agree, but you can't tell me they're not out there, because they are.
No kidding (Score:2)
I've been a gamer pretty much all my life. My grandpa had an Atari 2600 I used to play, when I was like 7 years old my mom got me an NES and so on. Games are, to this day, my primary form of entertainment. By pretty much any definition I'd be a "hardcore" gamer. Personally, I think it's wonderful to see more and more people get in to gaming. I think it is extremely entertaining and a good amount of entertainment for the dollars. Also, I think it is better mentally for you than just sacking out in from of th
An idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been playing a little Red Alert (1) since it was released for free this year. At the same time, the weather is turning cold and I've had to set up my bicycle on a stationary trainer. Wouldn't it be cool to have an RTS where at least one of your resources was wattage produced from some exercise?
Pedal faster, build more units/buildings/etc.
cf. Propcycle (Score:5, Interesting)
First thing that came to my mind when I read the headline was Propcycle [videogameworkout.com].
I'd love to rig something similar up, using MS Flight Simulator and an exercise bike.
Parent
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I thought of that too, I tried one at a walmart once, sure wish there was one around here, or I could make a home version of Prop Cycle.
Here is the KLOV link witch some screenshots
http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9139 [klov.com]
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you want to peddle from Hongkong to England be my guest...
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I liked PropCycle too. But it wasn't free flight; you were constrained to a track. I'm amazed that someone hasn't done a gym version of something like Crimson Skies, which is available in a motion-platform arcade version.
The gym I use had some stair-climbers with web browsers for a while, but they were from a dot-com. When the dot-com failed, the units continued to work, but without a server to update them, they played the same ads over and over. Eventually the things were removed.
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Check this out: http://www.tacxvr.com/ [tacxvr.com]
Makes indoor cycling at home almost bearable. I say almost because I have such a rig but I never use it, I prefer to cycle outdoors or in a spin class.
Lot of people enjoy it though. Here in Norway there is a winter series on these contraptions where people compete in a mix of VR terrains and Real Life Videos.
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Wow, thanks! That's pretty much what I was thinking of, minus the hovercrafts.
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Personally I like the battle of brains / fun strats / unexpected things and such in RTSes, not doing workouts.
I play WC3 first and go to the gym later, or the other way around, depending on how serious I am :D
Back in the days Quake used to work just fine as cardiovascular training to, all that stress, fear and anger must have lead o something :D :D
If nothing else slamming the mouse in the table each time you die sure as hell has to work your lats, or something
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The only thing is that you definitely *don't* want to be going all out during cario exercise. You want to be keeping at the right heart rate. Better would be a game that went fastest when you are closest to the target heart rate for your age.
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There's nothing wrong with going at a steady pace, but at least what I've been led to believe is that if you want to improve your fitness you need to vary your workouts, do intervals (30-60 seconds all out, similar amount of time at a resting pace, or variations). The terrain variation lets you decide whether to gear down to spin at a steady pace or power over the top with a quick burst.
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Going all out is not "interval training", but this is exactly what making the game speed match the wattage will encourage. Instead, the player will likely ramp up until near collapse, and then stop entirely.
Interval training requires you ramp bake the effort periodically. If the game encourages that sort of thing, then by all means, that's great.
Treadmills into FPSes? (Score:2)
Why not just play laser game? Seems like much more fun and "creative."
I'm all for working out but cardio exercise in general is fucking boring. Coupled with an FPS it probably get more fun if it works decent but I doubt it can beat reality.
Something like laser game but out in the wild (as in urban setting / forest / ..) must be awesome. More wargames for everyone! :D
Riding a stationary bike in a gym even if you got a virtual rider riding on a screen as well will still just be a stationary bike in the same f
Treadmills into totalitarianism (Score:2)
"Why not just play laser game? Seems like much more fun and "creative.""
Can I have that in a home version?
"I'm all for working out but cardio exercise in general is fucking boring. Coupled with an FPS it probably get more fun if it works decent but I doubt it can beat reality."
The Chinese version however has you shooting peasants as you pedal along.
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Oh, didn't got that it was for home usage, I saw it more like gym equipment.
There is some laser game things for home usage to but I guess they suck.
Where is the outdoor version!?! With slow showing laser beams :D
The Chinese version however has you shooting peasants as you pedal along.
Carmageddon pedal car edition? :D
Ok, if the car could react a la electronic bump cars and you could hit each other someway then maybe :D
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Not everyone lives in a forest or near a forest.
Having a choice between getting smoked on the street and using the stationary bike at the gym I'll choose the stationary bike.
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That depends on how you play laser game, and how serious you are on a treadmill or on a bike.
YOU may go to a gym because it gives the maximum result for the least effort, but you shouldn't expect that to be the case for everyone else.
And there are more fun things to do in a gym than running on a treadmill, practising olympic lifts for example or vertical jumps or whatever.
And more don't have to be better since recovery and food consumption effects the results as well.
Anyway, fact is that you are much more l
cool... (Score:2)
Do people really use these, on a regular basis? (Score:3, Interesting)
I lift for about an hour 5 days/week and run about 30-40mpw. When I work out, I want to be unpluged. I don't want to see a screen, don't want to interact.
It's my mind, my body and me. Nothing else. Everyone needs it.
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Hey,
I ride my road bike around a lot. Due to that fact that I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the weather almost always allows bicycling as a means of transportation, I have been able to keep my goal of going through one tank of gas per month on my SUV. I'm also fairly into mountain biking, with the beautiful foot hills available for single track and Sandia mountain available for downhill riding.
So, I'm pretty into biking. The goal of the above was to add SOME level of credibility to the below...
I tried
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Back in the early-mid 90's, when I was in high school, I belonged to the local golds gym. They had a "virtual reality" exercise bike that was a recumbent bike, with a monitor on top. You could pedal whereever you wanted, up hills, down trails, on roads. resistance on the pedaling would change to match the terain. (you could even go really fast and do virtual jumps!). Probably the coolest thing was that there was a second bike right next to it, and the two were linked. you could follow each other, race,
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Adding a gaming aspect to the workout removes the boredom and distracts from the discomfort, allowing these people to get the exercise they know they need--and enjoy it rather than enduring it (or maybe just giving up something they hate doing).
Expresso S3 review (I've used one) (Score:5, Informative)
We have one of these at work, and we're expecting another. It's a blast. And I'm not a gamer.
First, the downsides:
1) The shifter is not very well designed. It's a single lever mounted on the stem, which is an inconvenient spot. With 30 "gears" and very sharp changes of gradient, it's not uncommon to have to shift by 10 gears or more in a matter of seconds to avoid stalling out. The shifting doesn't seem all that responsive either, so there's a tendency to overshift, which usually leaves you moving too slowly. I'd rather have two shifters mounted on the bars, with the left shifter giving you 3-5 gears in one shot (i. e. something like front and rear derailleurs on a "real" bike). This is by far the weakest part of the setup. If they would fix that, it would be a much stronger product.
2) Every course I've tried has at least one very sharp downhill curve, which I find disorienting (maybe because I'm not a gamer). Shutting my eyes helps, but then I don't know what terrain is coming up, so I'm likely to be in the wrong gear in a hurry. One person at the gym tried it once and found that he just couldn't use it because of that.
3) The saddle simply isn't very good. It's adjustable in maybe 1/2" increments both vertically and front to back (which is OK for this purpose, but finer increments would be better). However, it's a wide, heavily cushioned saddle, which really isn't very comfortable for long rides. It would be nice if there were a couple of different saddles to pick from, and you could just plunk down the one you like at any given time. It's a much better saddle than the usual exercise bike saddle, but that's not saying much.
Good points:
1) There's just a lot more variety than any other exercise bike I've seen (not that I'm an expert). The changing terrain makes things interesting, much more so than any standard programs. That's a huge plus.
2) The pedals are "real", with toe clips on one side (yes, the old fashioned kind, but they work) and clip-in pedals on the other. I'm not sure which clip-in system; it's obviously one of the SPD variants, but I don't know which one. If your bike shoes have a different system, it's not likely to work. The system looks like it doesn't have any side to side or rotational play, which makes it hard for some folks (when I was riding, I absolutely needed that because of my overpronation and toe-out).
3) There's a good range of courses, everything from a 1 mile flat track course to a 20 miler that looks like a major mountain pass. They're divided into four groups (plus one more "ride over the monsters" type thing), for easy, moderate, hard, and extreme, and ranked from easy to harder within the groups. The pace rider rides slower on the easy ones and harder on the hard ones, and you can adjust the continuous output of the pace rider. There are a few courses that aren't available without a paid membership, but it's not worth $10 a month just to get those few courses.
4) The bike can be connected to the internet, with some additional features (I don't know what they all are; ours isn't connected yet).
Neutral points:
1) While your avatar responds to the steering, it doesn't really affect the riding in any way, except on the game course. It won't let you go off the course (if you try to steer off, or don't try to steer on, it just keeps you at the side of the course). You can also ride right through other riders, and they can ride through you if you're slower. It doesn't really feel natural, but without actual movement, it would be very hard to make the steering feel natural. I don't care all that much.
2) I don't know how it computes the relationship between wattage (power output) and calorie consumption. It gives me somewhat lower calorie numbers compared to the other exercise bikes we have, which may or may not be due to shifting response (it's easy to not shift high enough on downhills). For a 30~40 minute ride, I've averaged 227~240 watts vs. 235~260 that I typically average on the
ESPN Street Racing (Score:2, Interesting)
The key is to really work fun game play into the system, and I think this has a much greater chance of success than the children's "educational game software" attempts to make learning fun.
I remember an old playstation ESPN racing game where your character would ride around on a bike, but you could kick the other players on either side and knock them to the ground.
Add some blood, maybe a few screams as they hit the pavement and I think we would have a winner!
If you want to get really sophisticated that woul
Accurate as usual (Score:4, Informative)
I see Slashdot is showing its attention to journalistic accuracy. I've actually *played* Expresso bike thing and you don't "gun down" dragons with "handle-bar mounted triggers".
The buttons are the handle-bars are for shifting gears. The basic gameplay is that you run over coins of various colors and then have to go run into dragons of the matching color. (With various point values.) It's a pretty lame game, but it is mildly distracting.
I suspect that most people will stick to the basic "ride around a track with a pace rider" bit, which is decent enough.
The biggest problem is that even if you play at a machine in the gym, you still have to shell out $9.95/month to unlock a lot of the tracks. That's a pretty hefty price for a bike-racing game.
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It was something like 1-2 tracks per level that are locked, out of a total of maybe 8 per level. That's no big deal.
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The bigger annoyance is not saving the ghost data for every track.
GameBike (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't exactly a new idea. I bought a gamebike (http://www.cateyefitness.com/GameBike/ [cateyefitness.com]) a year ago for this sort of thing. It's an exercise bike which plugs into a PS2. Unfortunately, I don't have a TV for it, yet. So, at the moment it's just serving as an ordinary exercise bike. My impression from the brief time I tried it, is that'll it'll be more fun that just riding an exercise bike, but it isn't a great controller. Part of the problem is that PS2 games aren't made with this bike in mind. Custom games written for it could make it much more fun.
Re:GameBike (Score:5, Funny)
Custom games written for it could make it much more fun.
Paperboy 2009 !!!
Parent
Fifteen Years Old (Score:2)
What does the future hold? (Score:2)
And then after they've got games where you exercise while competing head-to-he
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Re:lmao (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. This is a great step forward. There's plenty of people who like to exercise socially, and need that. There probably a much larger number who are overweight and embarrassed to do so. This starts them on the path to fitness, where they then may have the confidence to try social exercise.
Plus, while most games cater for the teenage male market successfully, the Wii started including a much larger audience of new gamers. This is a logical next step. There are many of us out there who would like to be gamers, but really don't want to shoot things, nor play driving games. Historically we have been excluded from most games (or have not been marketed to, if other games exist that we might find interesting). This kind of game is interesting. We need more lateral thought in gaming to include a much larger number of people.
Parent
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http://au.gamespot.com/news/6200065.html [gamespot.com]
Re:lmao (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't agree. The reality is that for a lot of us it is very difficult to find enough people who are available to play, who are at a similar enough skill level. When I was younger it was much easier. Now, people are too busy for a pick up game. Clubs tend to have people who are pretty serious, and I'm not. So, if I want to exercise, I'm left either going to the gym (boring!) or finding an activity that's solo (biking - a little better). Something like this could make getting exercise a little more fun for people like me, and I don't see how that's a bad thing.
Parent
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What's more funny is that most of these are aerobic exercises. Just play soccer or something. I hope these fail, because this only makes the art of "fun exercise" less social.
But what if workout chains started installing networked Wii-like facilities?
I would pay good money to see a roomful of hot chicks storming the beaches of Normany on bicycles.
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That's a super idea, Hojima.
I've got a full-time job, a wife, and two kids. I scuba dive, play in a concert band, and play DnD once a week.
When, exactly, would I go out and join a soccer team? During naptime for the toddlers? In the evenings, when it's one of the rare days when neither my wife nor I are going out so we can spend some time together? Sure, I can bike to work, but I'm the one who drops the kids off at daycare. That means either using a trailer (sunny and warm days only) or biking when daycare'
Re:lmao (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, what he said....now, I do not have kids, but I have a spouse and a cat -- both of which need attention -- a job that requires me to travel about 60% of the year and I teach scuba diving on the side. In short, I spent plenty of time outside of the house already, and joining a soccer or other team sport team would be just impossible: I'd not be able to be there regularly due to an unpredictable travel-schedule, and so I'd make a horrible team-mate (not to mention, I'm a horrible soccer-player to begin with, making me even more of a boat-anchor for a soccer-team) and, frankly, what evenings/weekends I do have left, I'd rather spend with the spouse and the cat, than with a bunch of sweaty 40-something men chasing a ball.....
The nearest gym is about an hour away from where we live, btw., so one hour of workout would "cost" 3 hours of wall-clock-time. Just not cost-efficient.
Wanting to stay in relatively good health, we set aside a room in our house, and rebuilt into a gym -- principally a treadmill and some other exercise machines, and a wall-mounted TV. It allows - as notes Beardo the Bearded - that whenever either of us have got an hour available, we can get some exercise in without having to commit to trekking to the nearest gym. Often, it's of the form "hey, I was home first tonight, I'll toss the roast in the oven, then do an hour on the 'mill and some back-strengthening workout", and concurrently keeping up with what's wrong with the world on the TV.
We've got a WiiFit as well, and while that's great fun, I do not get the same "sweat" out of it nor do I manage to get my heart-rate high enough and exercise/strengthen my back. It's great for its Yoga-exercises, and a fun thing to do together (although, it'd have been cool had the WiiFit allowed for easier alternations between two players exercising together).
Anyways, when we were acquiring the treadmill, we were looking to see if there were more "fun" options than just "running at various paces and inclinations", but what we found was insufficient: either it was "more game than exercise" or it was "more flimsy" -- or the game just didn't seem like much fun after having tried them out once. TSo for us, and for now, it's the treadmill (with iFit training programs) + TV for the gym, and the WiiFit/WiiSport for having fun in the living room.
Now, just need to find a way of getting the cat to exercise as well....
Btw., "Beardo the Bearded", good job at dropping 15lb with the WiiFit! Keep it up!
Parent
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But I'm antisocial you insensitive clod!!
WTF, it's the first chance I get to make this joke and it turns out to be sincere.
selfish much? (Score:2, Insightful)
some of us have a desire to leave the world in better condition than we found it.
This involves life outside of simulation, even if games are a great escape in moderation.
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