Move over, chocolate chip cookies.
Stand aside, sunsets over the Grand Canyon.
I’ve got a whole new love in my life, and baby, it’s a beauty.
For my birthday last week, my wonderful in-laws and my equally-terrific wife got me two new games for the Nintendo Wii: One, the Wii Grand Slam Tennis, I’ve been pining for for several months, and so far it’s pretty awesome.
It’ll be even more awesome when I figure out how to play well on the damn thing; you’ve got all kinds of shot control, but the movement side to side and up to the net is really difficult. Alas, I will master it.
But no, the true apple of my eye is the other game I received, and my friends, at the risk of sounding like Vince from Slap Chop, I cannot recommend this product highly enough.
Basically, you are taken to an island and you compete in 12 different sports, sports that you have never seen before in a video game. There’s wakeboarding, where you’re behind a boat and you’ve got to twist the remote side to side, catch a wave, and do crazy flips in the air (I rule at this game).
There’s skydiving, where you link up with people on your way to the ground from 20,000 feet and have to hold the position for a few seconds (this game, I’m not so good at).
But the best, best, best game is the sword-fighting duel challenge, which is exactly what it sounds like. You and a competitor are all dressed up in fighting gear, and stand across from each other in dueling positions. Then, when the horn sounds, you attack each other immediately, trying to land blows and shove the other person off the cliff, and plummeting down 50 feet into the water below.
It’s kind of like the joust competition on the old “American Gladiators” (which was just the most awesome Saturday morning show ever, and probably worthy of its own post at some point. Here’s an awesome video of kick-ass MMA fighter Gina Carano in a montage of her best moments on the show. But I digress.)
Anyway, as great as the joust competition is, and it takes a lot of skill, the wacky Nintendo people came up with something even more bizarre.
It’s called the “Speed Slice” challenge, and this is how it works: You and your opponent (in my case, my wife) stand their with your swords, and wait as a scary-looking man holds various objects.
Then scary looking man throws them in the air. You wait for the objects to land, and for a split second an arrow appears telling you which direction to slice. The first person to slice correctly gets a point, and first to 10 points wins.
I should point out that the objects include a pencil, a block of ice, and a watermelon. It’s insanely funny.
God, how I would’ve loved to be in that production meeting in Japan when they came up with this:
Employee 1: OK, so we’ve got this great sword-fighting game, where people can joust with each other and pretend to inflict violence.
Employee 2: Yeah, but that’s not enough. We need MORE!
Employee 1: OK, how about this: We give the two people swords, and then we have that dude from our Wii boxing game throw stuff at them, and they’ve got to cut it up really fast.
Employee 2: Brilliant. What should we have our guy throw?
Employee 1: How about, I don’t know, watermelon. And blocks of ice. And, and …
Employee 2: Roman candles!
Employee 1: Yes, Roman candles! Of course. We’ve got a winner on our hands!
Employee 2: Great. Let’s go eat lunch, and hey, do we have any more of those drugs around?
If you’re curious, here’s a demo.
So yeah, we played Wii Sports Resort a lot over the weekend. There’s also basketball, a frisbee game where you throw the frisbee and your little dog partner runs and catches it, and a very cool cycling game.
Bravo, Wii people. Bravo.
P.S. OK, since you’ve hung around this far, two entertaining if old YouTubes to give you a smile:
First, since the Vince from Slap Chop reference got me thinking about it, here’s three minutes of pure genius:
And then, because you know you love it, and because it’s one of my favorite movie montages EVER …
Daniel La Russo will live forever.
Wide World of Stuff 