::A Geek in Korea::

My wife tutors her younger cousins in English on the weekends as a favor to our Aunt. Right now they are both preparing for their final examinations of the year. There are two weeks before the big tests, and this is “crunch time.” Today my wife was supposed to go over to their house early in the morning. She had her coat on and was ready to step out of the door when she got a call from the family. They had rescheduled a math tutor, and needed to postpone the English class until later in the afternoon. My wife told them to just stop by our house when their classes were finished. Since we live nearby the bus stop that has a direct connection to their apartment complex too, it wasn’t too hard to get the boy she was supposed to teach over to our house without a problem.

I had already walked Yoshi, so I just kept quiet in the computer room when they were studying together in the other room. My wife is a grammar tutor, so I don’t really need to “help” her with the class. They studied for ninety minutes, and after it was over, I fired up the Wii. This is the first time we had anyone over to play the games with us. My wife and I had played a few times when we first got the second controller, but her cousin is much better at video games. It was a Wii Sports challenge! Bring it on!

We started out by making a “Mii” for him. The first spirt we tried was Boxing. I went “easy” on him. He knocked me down a few times before I cleaned his clock. It was closer than I’m willing to admit feeling comfortable about. He had a harder time keeping up with me in tennis. Getting the timing down is always tricky, but he did very well for a total novice. We moved to baseball, then into bowling. We also did some training modes to let him practice some of the skills needed for playing some of the games. He really liked Home Run Contests, and serving in Tennis. He served an “ace” a few times with his jump serve. I’m still unable to do that, and I refuse to jump around and anger our downstairs neighbors.

He was having a blast. If I had to switch controllers to set up a menu or choose an option, his controller was sweaty. I kept telling him if he wanted to take a break and drink some water it would be ok. He got a nice workout and was blowing off some stress about his tests. Every once in a while he’d take a walk over into my computer room to check out my Nintendo DS games. He later told my wife when she was walking him to the bus stop that he forgot the word, “borrow”, so he didn’t ask me to take a game home. Too bad he has to study, otherwise I’d have let him have a game to play for a while.

Since this was the first Wii Sports party we’ve had, I think we learned a few things. We need to make sure we have a bottle of cold water on hand for everyone. We also need a bigger living room if we ever have more than one person over to play. With two people on the couch swinging around, it’s easy to get a Wiimote to the head if you aren’t careful. I’ve also got to get more mulitplayer games on the Virtual Console when people need to take a break from swinging their arms. I’m looking at “Bomberman ‘93” (or not, since there is rumored to be a WiiWare version the works.) or “Gunstar Heroes“.

Having games to play with people when they come over to the apartment is great, but I’m still really looking forward to Super Smash Brothers Brawl, the real reason I bought the console. That game is a party game, as well as an online brawler. Even if I have friends over or not, I’ll be playing it for a very long time.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: wii, wii sports, video games, cousin, relatives