Wii Fit Plus Kung Fu

My Wii Fitness| Wii Fit Plus Balance Board Games. Wii Fit Plus Balance Board Games are going to be a big hit. The launch of Wii Fit Plus is October 1st 2009 in Japan, so make sure you have your credit cards a ready to grab your new games. These new balance games are set to rival Wii Fit, and will create so many opportunities for rehab fun.

The best part? You have the option of just buying the Wii Fit Plus sofware for your balance board if you already have the Wii Fit. Great! No need to spend extra cash and have two great big balance boards cluttering up your lounge!

Kung Fu

Follow the movements of the Miis on screen to perform Kung Fu. Punching and kicking is performed by using a combination of the Balance Board and the Wii Remote and Nunchaku.

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Snowball Fight

Dodge behind barriers to avoid oncoming snowballs by moving left and right on the Balance Board. Point at the screen with your Wii remote to aim your own tosses.

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Marching Band

March on the Balance Board to the beat while thrusting the Wii Remote & Nunchaku into the air based on icons that scroll down the screen.

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Segway Circuit

Shift your body weight around to move left, right, forward and backwards on your Segway while holding the Wii Remote sideways. Bop into the moles and beach balls that are scattered on the beach to earn points.

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Obstacle Course

Jog on the Balance Board to make your Mii run through an Ostacle Course in the clouds. Jump over platforms and dodge giant swinging boulders.

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Skateboarding

Shift your weight around on the Balance Board to control your Skateboarding Mii. Step off with one foot to gain speed. Perform tricks off of ramps in an indoor skate park for points.

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Perfect 10

Swings your hips to the left, right, front and back to bump into numbered balls that surround your Mii. The goal is to make a total of 10 and continue to do so until you run out of time.

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Tilt City

Controls flippers on screen by tilting the Wii Remote for the top one and shift your weight on the Balance Board for another two on the bottom. Colored balls will roll down the screen and you must try to match the colors to the target areas on the bottom for points.

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Juggling

Shift your weight from side to side and try to keep your Mii balanced ontop of a ball in the circus. Meanwhile use the Wii Remote and Nunchaku to toss up balls and attempt to juggle them.

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Birds-eye Bullseye

Flap your arms like a bird to control the height that your Chicken suited Mii flies. Shift your weight around on the Balance Board to try and land successfully on many targets that appear over the vast ocean.

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Article Source

‘Wii Fit helped me to walk again’

Thursday, 22 January 2009

A young Irish girl has learned to walk again thanks to her doctors — and a computer game.

Nicole Cahill (10) from Enniscorthy, Co Wexford, took her first steps in four years years at a New York hospital late last year.

Since returning home on December 14, Nicole has stunned family and friends with her progress and is now expected to walk unaided by the end of the year.

Nicole’s mum, Mairead, said: “She’s doing really well. She’s in therapy nearly six days a week now,” says Mairead.

“At home she’s not using the walking frame and she leaves it at the side of the wall in school.

“We’ll have to wait and see but we think she’s doing so well that she’ll be walking [unaided] sooner than we think.”

Meanwhile, Nicole’s parents no longer have to pay for private therapy sessions since a Wexford hotel gave Nicole a year’s membership in their leisure centre for free.

“Ferrycarraig Hotel gave her membership for a year and she’s going to be starting her hydrotherapy with them,” said a delighted Mairead.

The hotel’s instructors will be looking after Nicole from now on, and in between therapy she uses one of her most prized Christmas presents to keep strengthening her muscles.

“The Wii Fit has really helped. It’s great because there are so many balancing and stretching exercises on it.

“I also do yoga with her at home, and she does exercises on a ball. The Wii has taken an awful lot of pressure off her as well.”

Nicole also got an electric reclining chair as a donation from Enniscorthy businesses to help her unwind after the day.

“People have been great to her,” says Mairead.

Nicole spent six months in a New York rehabilitation hospital to get back on her feet after a virus left her paralysed at only six years of age.

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White, Phelps spin Olympic gold into videogames

Thu Dec 18, 2008, By John Gaudiosi

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) – After scoring big wins in the Olympics snowboarder Shaun White and swimmer Michael Phelps have set their sights on another prize — videogames.

The Gold medalists are parlaying their prowess on the slopes and in the pool into sports games that feature their likeness and promote active lifestyles.

White has completed “Shaun White Snowboarding,” with Ubisoft while Phelps has partnered with start-up game publisher 505 Games for a series of videogames for iPhone and consoles. The first game is due hit stores in the spring 2010.

“I believe this will be a tremendous opportunity to help continue my quest to raise the profile for the sport of swimming,” Phelps, a 14-time Olympic gold medalist, said in a statement.

Although both are famous sportsmen tying a superstar athlete to developing a game for phenomenal athletes consoles like Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 can be risky.

“Phelps is the most phenomenal athlete I’ve ever seen, but as someone who actually was a world class swimmer, I can’t think of anything more boring than a swimming videogames,” said Michael Pachter, videogame analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Activision’s Tony Hawk skateboarding franchise, which has generated over $1 billion since launching in 1999, is the only current game that carries the name of a single athlete.

White, who’s a mainstream brand thanks to his exploits in both skateboarding and snowboarding in the X-Games, has spent the past two years working with Ubisoft’s acclaimed Montreal development studio on his new snowboarding game.

“I was sitting in a board room with all of these programmers and game designers and I was trying to convey to them what it feels like to actually ride and what my goals were with the game,” said White, who’s an avid gamer.

Although all of the new games feature White’s motion-captured moves and voice acting, the Wii game, “Shaun White Snowboarding Road Trip,” takes advantage of Nintendo’s Wii Fit balance board to allow players to steer the on-screen action with their body.

“Obviously, it’s easier to replicate the sensation of boarding on the Wii because we have the balance board, but with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 there’s a whole culture behind our sport and you can see that in the amount of clothes and boards and customization options in the game.”

While White is the driving force behind the development and marketing of the game, players won’t take control of his avatar in the game. White wanted players to be able to express themselves as individuals in the game, including being able to download their own music for the soundtrack.

John Taylor, videogame analyst, Arcadia Research, said “Shaun White Snowboarding” sold 259,000 copies in the U.S. in November and generated $13.6 million for Ubisoft with 40 percent of those sales for the Wii console.

With the success of the first game, White said he’s already started working on the sequel.

“Now that I have the knowledge and I can speak to programmers better and I understand a lot more about what’s possible and what’s not possible, this will all help with the next game,” said White.

Game publishers are hoping that fans of White and Phelps with turn to games featuring their idols, just as they have for Hawk.

Part of my treatment has been to do ‘Cawthorne Cooksey’ exercises on a daily basis. These exercises involve turning on the spot, looking right to left in succession, walking a ‘tightrope’ (heal to toe) with eyes open and eyes closed.

I find these exercises to be really boring, and so the Wii Fit has been my saviour! The Wii Fit has so many balance games that can be applied to my treatment, including a Tightrope game where you have to walk your Mii across a tightrope strung over a really tall building. It’s so much fun, and really good training to perfect your balance. Other great Wii games are the Yoga balance games that require skill and poise, and my other favourite is the football game where you lean from side to side on the Wii balance board to header those footballs!

All in all, it makes perfecting your balance lots of fun, a great accompaniment to any physio balance exercises.

I thoroughly recommend the Wii and Wii Fit for fun gaming, rehablitation and to tone up or lose weight. Go for it!

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Rehab facilities finding many uses for Wii Fit By BEN LEACH

Published: Monday, December 01, 2008

When someone has positional vertigo, a condition that causes sudden sensations of dizziness, sending that person across a tight-rope may not seem like the best idea.

But that’s exactly the type of challenge presented to Ann Ross as she attempts to keep her balance. A crowd is cheering her on as she carefully manages her way across the rope, avoiding some kind of angry mechanical bear trap that’s out to get her along the way.

Ross, 58, of Mays Landing, isn’t actually on a rope suspended between buildings. Instead, she’s in a totally safe environment within the walls of Shore Memorial Hospital’s Physical Therapy Department, and she’s navigating a virtual tightrope via the Wii Fit’s balance pad.

When the Nintendo Wii came out in 2006, it was immediately recognized for it’s unique controller design. The Wii’s “nunchuck” takes away the traditional “push a bunch of buttons” approach to a video game controller and forces a player to get up and swing the remote control around to play games.

On the basic Wii Sports program, players swing the remote to recreate games of bowling, tennis and baseball. Nursing homes and senior centers latched onto the gaming console almost immediately as it encouraged seniors to keep moving and stay active.

The Wii Fit, released earlier this year, uses a balance pad. After measuring a player’s weight, the pad can match the player’s movements on the screen, from basic balance exercises in yoga to more advanced games like blocking soccer balls, rhythm boxing and jogging.

While Nintendo stresses that the Wii and Wii Fit are not meant to replace normal exercise, the console and its games are starting to be investigated as a possible means for helping people with rehabilitation and physical therapy.

Last year, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey conducted a study on a patient with cerebral palsy, a movement disorder that can affect balance and coordination. They found that after four weeks of using the basic Wii system, the patient had better visual perception, posture and could actually stand for longer periods of time.

Not only did the rehabilitation work, but when the patient played the Wii with a healthy player, he was able to quickly teach his body to mimic the other player’s movements. This is quite a task for cerebral palsy patients, as they often have to find different ways of trying to walk and having control of their bodies over long periods of time.

“It was really wild, because in the next game, he was using a whole new technique,” said Judith E. Deutsch, the lead researcher on the study and professor and director of Research in Virtual Environments and Rehabilitation Sciences Lab in the Department of Rehabilitation and Movement Science at UMDNJ.

It’s just one case, but it’s inspired the team to look at how other patients could benefit. This summer, they looked at patients who had suffered strokes who used the Wii Fit program. They were comparing how patients benefited from using Wii Fit as opposed to how they benefited from regular rehabilitation exercises.

Though health benefits, including encouraging exercise and developing better hand-eye coordination, have been attributed to the Wii, Nintendo is not specifically asking hospitals to use their product for physical therapy.

“While we knew there was a lot of potential to appeal to a very expanded audience, we did not intend or even imagine it would end up as a rehabilitation tool,” said Amber McCollom, a spokeswoman for Nintendo of America, in an e-mail.

Virtual reality equipment specifically tailored to rehabilitation might be a better fit, but making it available at the cost of the Wii is still at least a few years away, according to UMDNJ’s Deutsch. Current equipment can cost thousands of dollars and has to remain in hospitals. By contrast, the Nintendo Wii retails for $250, and the Wii Fit for $90, and they can be used at home.

The Nintendo Wii works well, but Deutsch said it’s not for every rehab patient.

“There’s a certain amount of hand control required to operate it, and there’s a lot of patients who don’t have that (hand control),” Deutsch said. The Wii Fit doesn’t require hands, but people do need to be able to stand and keep their balance.

When it came to putting the Wii Fit into Shore Memorial, cost was not the issue. According to Jennifer Pesce, a physical therapist and director of rehabilitation services at Shore Memorial, the physical therapy team instead had the same problem that most people will have this holiday season.

“One of the biggest holdups was actually finding one,” Pesce said. Like other Wii-wannabes, the hospital had to sign up on a waiting list at a local GameStop and wait a few weeks before receiving their order.

A normal rehabilitation routine for Ross involves spinning around on a chair – once with eyes closed, and again with eyes opened – to recreate the symptoms that bother Ross so she can naturally adjust to them.

On the Wii Fit, Pesce stays close by as Ross balances her body in a series of different games and activities, from yoga to skiing. Ross starts at very basic levels so Pesce can see what exercises on the Wii Fit Ross can handle.

“We can analyze their technique while they’re doing it,” Pesce said. “We can immediately change the parameters and see how it feels.”

On Ross’ first try at tight rope, her virtual self plummets to an uncertain fate. The second time around, though, she carefully navigates her way across.

“I’m upset with myself when I don’t do well,” Ross said. “But I think it takes time.”

Ross was diagnosed with Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, or BPPV, after feeling dizzy several times. In the ear, vestibular canals are home to hair-like sensors that monitor when a person’s head rotates.

Those hairs become dislodged in people with BPPV, and as a result, they’re much more sensitive to changes in head position than normal.

“I’m not getting dizzy from this,” Ross said. “But I’m finding that I have to concentrate on how I’m balancing myself.”