Video Gaming for Health and Fitness?!?

With the exception of Unreal Tournament maven Asia Carrerra, video gamers never look good naked. Sure, video game characters like Duke Nuke 'Em and Max Payne are chisel-featured lotharios with dark, brooding pasts and muscles bursting out of their wifebeaters, but gamers themselves tend to shop in the "husky" section of Ross. Never missing a chance to exploit other people's weaknesses, video game companies are jumping on the chance to profit from the fat-osity of gamers, using the natural inclinations of geeks who interact with machines to inspire exercise and health. It'll never work, of course, but here's a few of the gaming gimcracks out there aimed at ending the morbid obesity of video game fans.

Yourself!Fitness

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A new world of Pilates, Yoga, and Aerobic workouts are yours to enjoy! Yourself!Fitness is played on an Xbox and geared toward women – a peculiar business strategy – but this "game" offers more than an annoying riff on punctuation (An exclamation point in the middle of a word? Whaaa?): It keeps track of your workouts, provides healthy recipes, and demonstrates proper exercise form.

Maya, your new-agey "virtual personal trainer," rules with an iron-fist and a bottle of Dasani. She is "an easy-going, approachable personality who understands your needs," according to company literature, and she sports tight-fitting yoga wear, too. Yum. Workouts are customized according to your heart rate, and new "levels" (backgrounds, music tracks, etc.) are unlocked when fitness goals are achieved.

I'm not a chick, and I have no interest in doing any kind of exercise, ever, so I'm hardly the target market for this product; but as a gamer, my gut reaction (get it?) is: boring. The game has yet to find distribution, so there is still time for developer responDESIGN (Again with the unorthodox spelling. Could these people be any more creative?) to add the following features to make the game more acceptable to pasty fatsos like myself:

1. Maya needs bigger cans. She has a great ass from all that working out, but the bitch needs implants, stat.

2. Add zombies.

3. A USB scale would provide accountability. As it is, I would totally tell Maya I was anorexic to get to the final boss.

4. Any game that has a menu-item called "meditate" won't be cool (other than Fakir Ahhef-Tarrano's Xtreme Enlightenment Challenge, of course.) Remove it.

5. Soul-destroying, You Don't Know Jack-style insult-hurling for fatties would be rad.

kiloWatt

Good lord, again with the whacked-out punctuation. Anyway. Imagine steering a car in Grand Theft Auto with a parking meter instead of your usual controller. That's the gyst of the kiloWatt, which replaces the left stick in your Xbox or PS2 with a chest-high, rigid bar that takes tons of force to move even slightly. It is also, according to the distributor's Website, a "kickass controller that will make your eyeballs bleed." I don't know about bleeding eyeballs, but I tried the contraption out at E3, and it's pretty cool. The reaction time is surprisingly quick, so you won't get your ass handed to you in Halo, and the workout is strenuous. The guys behind the thing were muscular German fellows with big, straight teeth who reminded me of storm troopers, but they gave me a pair of fingerless gloves, "for extreme sports or intensity gaming," so I guess they were nice after all. Go get a kiloWatt and work on your guns, man.

Dance Dance Revolution

News Flash: Kids who play DDR and its many sequels are not so fat. I know because it says so on CNN. The frenetic dancing game requires levels of coordination and rhythm I just don't have, but it's supposedly very fun, and obese teens are benefiting. They need all the help they can get.

Bikes, Bikes, Bikes

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There are several companies out there that offer stationary bicycles that hook up to game systems that run from professionals only, several-thousand-dollar gym machines to the Cateye GAMEBIKE, a gadget that retails for a hundred fifty bucks and hooks your road-bike up to your PS1. There's even one called the "Exergame" for the Super Nintendo. Quaint.

These products are generally compatible with any game for their respective, outdated systems, but most games just don't require any sort of joystick action that's akin to spinning pedals, so if you're playing DOOM on your Cateye, you're basically using the pedals to replace the "move forward" button.

The only kind of games that would benefit from a bike controller are repetitive "button mashers" in which speed is variable, and those games are crazy and stupid.

Qmotions

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If you're one of the horrible people who play golf, might we recommend Qmotions? It comes with a swing-arm controller and hooks up to your PC to provide realistic golfy action. This thing is compatible with all major golf games, and promises "fun for family and friends." (Sorry. The image of a person playing a golf video game just hit me. I mean, how low can you sink in your life that you're sitting in front of your computer pretending to engage in the dumbest sport that's ever been invented? What kind of person does that? Jesus Christ.) But still, maybe your rich white uncle or your dad plays golf, and when Christmas comes you can get him the Qmotion and he'll smile and be all, "Wow! A swing-club-thing that hooks up to my computer! Thanks! I love it!" – but inside his head he'll be saying, "Oh, fucking great. More golf shit."

In conclusion, advancing technology is making it possible for video games and exercise to be fully integrated, but this is really a horrible idea. The one arena in all of life that my fellow pasty geeks and I indisputably rule is the realm of video games. Now, jocks want to muscle in and force me to work out if I want to play Tetris? My carefully cultivated leet skills will be outclassed by some jarhead who wastes his life lifting heavy things that don't need to be carried anywhere. Jocks should stay out of video games, man. We need clear dividing lines here. It's not like I go down to Bally's Fitness and expect the aerobics class to murder aliens.

Mr. Ochs is wasting his life playing video games and writing for AVN Online. Send him an e-mail, why don'tcha?