Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Wielding virtual swords

I've had sessions in World of Warcraft, playing my warrior, that lasted 6 hours or more. Although in the virtual world my character was busy swinging a rather heavy looking sword for hours, the physical effort I had to spend to make him do that was minimal. In fact in WoW, if you wanted to not use the special moves, you could just right-click once on the mob and all the sword-swinging would happen automatically, burning no real calories whatsoever.

Now Nintendo is planning to change that, with their "Wii" (formerly known as "Revolution") console and special motion detector controller. They presented games on the E3 where you played virtual tennis by swinging the Wii controller like a real tennis racket, played virtual golf by swinging it like a golf club. And in a Wii Legend of Zelda game you will be swinging the controller like a sword to do swordfighting.

Now a Wii controller is considerably lighter than a real metal sword. But swinging it will come closer to physical exercise than many gamers have ever been. ;) Probably fun for a while, but swinging that sword for the 50 to 100 hours it takes to finish the usual Legend of Zelda game sounds far too exhausting to me. I think I'll give that console a miss.

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