If your gym’s yoga classes are packed, or if you hope to cultivate a daily practice at home, Yoga for Wii might be your best ticket to Nirvana this coming winter.
No doubt, some yoga purists will be driven mad by Yoga for Wii’s distinctly Western a la carte approach to an ancient spiritual tradition. That’s because Yoga for Wii (www.yoga-game.com/) touches on multiple disciplines at the same time. It also includes tidbits of advice about eating right, the care and feeding of one’s chakras, and postures crafted to relieve back pain, arthritis, and headaches.
A supermodel whom I’ve never heard of, Anja Rubik, serves as your guide and guru in Yoga for Wii. (In case you did not know, life on the catwalk is extremely stressful.)
Animated characters demonstrate each posture, bending and stretching in cool-looking studio scenes and beneath giant statues and paintings depicting Buddha and others.
Yoga for Wii, due in November, is the first standalone Yoga title for the Wii, its developers say.
The game makes use of the Balance Board, which you may already have laying around if you purchased Wii Fit a while back. (The Balance Board helps, but it is not required to play Yoga.) Some exercises require you to hold the Wii remote, however.
GAMES
‘Mind reading’ titles making waves
A slew of games, from casual arcade titles to first-person shooters, are about to get a new controller: your brain.
This fall, the producers of the casual games website Hero 108 (www.hero108.tv) and the games publisher, Square Enix (www.square-enix.com), both plan to incorporate EEG-sensing headsets into at least some of their titles. And a little toy company by the name of Mattel will release its own “mind reading’’ game, Mindflex, in October.
NeuroSky Inc. makes the beta wave sensing technology used in all of the games. It is the same gimmick that has a “Star Wars’’-themed game, the Force Trainer, flying off the shelves at Toy Box in Hanover.
I say gimmick, because while NeuroSky’s technology is clever, it does not read your thoughts. (Your brain’s beta wave emissions increase as you intensify your concentration.) And that means with each of these novel games, you can only move an object (real or virtual) along a single axis, or hurl it in a particular direction.
That limited complexity, for many folks, I’m afraid, limits the fun in these games. Indeed, Mattel’s MindFlex looks a heck of a lot like Force Trainer, which I covered in June.
In each game, you concrete on moving a ball, driving it up and down with a fan controlled from the NeuroSky headset. NeuroSky (www.neurosky.com) also sells a device for the curious, and for games developers, which it calls the MindSet. It is a comfortable-looking pair of black headphones (about $200 at the NeuroSky Store), resembling a hands-free telephone headset you might get from Plantronic. The difference is that, instead of a mouthpiece, MindSet has an EEG sensor extending from one of its arms.
MindSet also comes with a wacky “telekinesis’’ game, The Adventures of NeuroBoy, as well a few mind-controllable applications, and NeuroSky’s Developer Tools.