Does anyone need yet another excuse to go out and buy a Wii? If you're looking for a vital reason to give your parents, here it is.

USA Today is reporting that the Wii is a very useful tool in rehabilitation.

What are they calling it?

Many patients don't like Physical Therapy. Having personally dealt with PT, it becomes extremely boring very quickly. The activities performed can create painful experiences, and due to the simplicity of the exercises, the mind really has nothing else to concentrate on.

It's the truth. I think that some of the Physical Therapists work a night job as dominatrices. They enjoy their day job a little too much. The Wii does you the favor of giving you something to concentrate on while performing activities to help you recover.

The article goes on to describe how the Wii is beneficial in helping wounded soldiers.

It doesn't stop there. The elderly are using the Wii to get healthy, and one of the side effects is the elderly are using it to bond with the grandkids.

Although excessive Wii'ing does have some side effects. I have seen these effects first hand while hooking up a friends system, and letting her win the first couple games of boxing. The conversation the next day included "Are you sore from playing Wii?" I guess it really is exercise.

There are other cases too.

It is good to see the Wii being put to use to help people who have been injured or are in need of some light exercise, like the elderly. It also does a wonderful job of bringing friends and family together and creating memorable moments!

Just remember kids, Wii in moderation. To much Wii'ing will make you go blind, uhm, I mean, give you tendonitis.

DevilsReject totally lets his friends beat him at any Wii game, just to make them feel better about themselves.

Mike over at Kotaku writes about an interesting piece of software called Colors!, available on the Nintendo DS (hacked version required). It utilizes the DS’ seldom-advertised pressure sensitivity feature. So seldom-advertised that I’ve never head of it, and I’d wager neither have you.

Check out some examples of artwork created on the DS at Evil Avatar, which also links to a larger gallery at Brombra.net.

You can Color! this editor amazed (ah-har-har!); I almost want to hack my DS so I can use this software. Quick, Nintendo, release something official for those of us who are too chicken to void our warranty. punk is currently scribbling away at The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

Amidst all the hoopla in the $40 billion global video game industry, it seems Santa doesn't care about Blu-Ray or overpriced consoles either.

Nintendo's Wii, the little arm-waving, ass-shaking system that could, outsold Sony's Playstation 3 by more than three to one in Japan in 2007, regaining first place in total sales. Mario & Co. couldn't be happier.

Nintendo enjoys the same 3-1 margin in sales against Sony in North America. When your system can't last long enough on shelves to gather dust (and customers are left sucking the dubious cash cow cock of chain stores to buy overpriced "bundle" packages), you're doing something right.

Or, you know, your company fails at increasing supply to meet demand.

I happen to have a sunnier disposition where the Wii is concerned. Mostly because I camped out for 12 hours outside the nearest Target that fateful November morn to be #2 in line. Your personal experience may differ.

Kamide also notes the Xbox 360 is still going strong this side of the pond. That's right. Microsoft is still #1 in the US, selling more than 4 million units this past holiday. However, Bill Gates' little "Red Ring of Death"ed love child is still holding the rear in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Not to mention the problems they encountered with Xbox Live outages.

Much like the storied sports rivalries of old, the fight between the Big Three and their loyal fanbases is everlasting. I don't know about you, but I'm too busy killing zombies and saving princesses to go throw the ball around.

thefreak owns 15 different gaming systems. He's a bigger dork than you.

Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.

Second Life Finds A Way To Suck More

The fact that you meet more furries than friends is only one of the reasons Second Life can suck at times. Adding to that factor, your avatar can now apparently fuck a unicorn to receive a virtual baby unicorn pet to play with. Yes, fuck - a - unicorn. While we're sure there's more than enough fetishes out there to cover a desire for some S&M with mythical, virtual creatures, being banged by a one-horned beast just doesn't play to our fancy.

Wanking With Your Wii

To anyone who said the Wii was a waste of time, a new game begs to differ. PandiPanda is a game that uses your Nintendo Wii-mote skills to their fullest. Using a graceful and quick up and down grip, the goal of the game appears to be to masturbate your panda faster than your opponent. It seems all those years of awkward high school experimentation will come in "handy" after all. [via]

Vibrator Sucks At Getting You Off

Objectifying your household objects, LoveHoney makes you look forward to chores. The Vortex Vibrations Suction Vacuum Cleaner Vibrator extends to give a good cleaning where it counts. The flow of air makes the gadget vibrate and stimulate. The site claims "you'll never moan about Hoovering again", which isn't the most accurate copywriting to an earlier claim of "better, longer orgasms".

The old-school gaming art show bursting with brilliant works inspired by games from the '80s and '90s returns. Starting today and running until May 12th, classic console connoisseurs can head out to sunny Los Angeles and take a nostalgic journey through a gallery populated with both eerie and charming renditions of their beloved 8-bit heroes.

"Hip" and "With it" attendees are advised to quickly snatch up that surprisingly affordable stencil of Duke the Daring brandishing his Glandhammer to Princess Peach. Please do be wary of new parents raised on classic games looking to decorate their newborns bedrooms with stylized relics of their past. They'll be the ones with expanding midsections wedged into designer jeans a few sizes too small.

Make a Star Wars game for the Wii with controls like this:



Can you imagine? I just about wet myself about the time the TIE Fighter blew up. This video, BTW, is a great example of why I think the Wii is the game console to own. There’s just no way that smashing a bunch of buttons on another controller would give you the same sort of thrill and satisfaction (PS3 fanboys commence flipping out in 3. . . 2. . . 1. . .).

I know this came out way back on Monday but I wanted to cover it nonetheless since it’s such a good deal, potentially. I say "potentially" because Wii Play comes packaged with a Wii remote and costs $49.99. A regular old gameless Wii remote will cost you $39.99, so basically you’re scoring a pretty decent disk of games for $10. However, the games aren’t all that great and if you don’t need a second remote, or already have one, you may want to pass.

Wii Play is a collection of nine mini-games. You start out only being able to play one game and have to work your way through to the others. Shooting Range is basically a slimmed down Duck Hunt 2.0, minus the mocking dog laughter (I hated that flea harboring bastard as a kid). It’s a pretty straight forward shooting game with balloons, disks, the occasional random duck, etc. The twist here is that one player can use two Wii remotes at the same time. If only there was something a little more menacing than big, blue balloons to shoot at.

Find Mii is a simple game where you pick out the two Miis that match or the one Mii that is different from a group. This game is good for about five-minutes of entertainment, 20 if you’re drinking heavily.

Pose Mii has you twisting and turning the remote to match the orientation of the outline of your Mii to that of a pattern on the screen. This game is good for about one-minute of entertainment. Drinking doesn’t help.

I was most excited for Table Tennis because I liked the tennis game on Wii Sports so much. I was sorely disappointed. Table Tennis is nothing like the game play for tennis on Wii Sports. You just move the cursor to where the ball is going. No swinging or anything like that. And the table is so short you have about 1/10 of a second to react. I moved on from this game as soon as I could and hope there’s a more full-fledged, tennis-like version of Table Tennis coming up instead.

Billiards didn’t live up to what I thought it would be. As far as I can tell, you can’t actually play a game of regular pool. Basically, what you do instead is hit balls into pockets and get the amount of points that were on that ball. High score wins. Once again, would love to see a fuller version of this.

Laser Hockey might be the best game on the disk. It’s basically an updated, flashier version of Pong. You can play with one player, although the two-player version is where it’s at. First person to eight points wins. I’ve definitely played this game the most.

Fishing is also surprisingly amusing even though there's not much replay value. What makes it entertaining is the force feedback on the Wii Remote. When a fish is nibbling and latches on, you can feel it. First time I’ve been fishing since I was a kid.

Charge! is like Excite Truck on a cow, only less fun. You can race a second player if you want to.

Tanks is probably the second best game on the disk and is hopefully a preview of games to come. You use the nunchuck with the remote to guide your tank around and shoot shells at opposing computer tanks. Would love to see a more hardcore tank game with the same set up and player-versus-player action (Tanks' two-player version has you trying to destroy more computer controlled tanks than your opponent.)

In the end, I regret buying Wii Play because I already had a second remote, probably won’t use the third that much, and the games themselves aren’t all that great overall. However, if you’re going to get a second remote, you might as well get Wii Play and the extra games that come with.

I, like most of you, never bothered to get a Nintendo GameCube. Let’s face it—it was an uninspiring system. Still, there were some great games made for it and now that you can play GameCube games on your Wii, it’s worth taking a look at the best ones.

Since I’ve never actually played any of these (once again, no GameCube for me) I’m looking to Gamespot.com for the goods. Here are there top 10 GameCube games according to the Web-guide.

Of course, now that I have a Wii, hopefully I'll be playing all of them eventually. From what I can tell by looking around, you can get them cheap on eBay and in used game stores. As if the Virtual Console didn't keep me busy enough.

Thanks to the release of at least three new games on the Virtual Console every week, Nintendo is helping to make Mondays suck less. And they just announced that today they’ll be making Super Mario World available for a mere $8.00 (errr….I mean 800 Wii points).

This is on top of Mario Kart 64 and Contra III: The Alien Wars being released last week. It’s a good time to be a Wii owner. You know, for $250 I think I would have still bought the Wii if the only thing it could do was play Virtual Console games.

Okay, so I know the “Wii” pun is the most overused on the Internets right now and I promise this will be the one and only time I use it. The truth is, my wife actually does like playing my Nintendo Wii. This is huge.

My wife and I have known each other for nearly eight years, and throughout our time together, she has been more than a little perplexed as to how a grown man can enjoy video games so much. It's not that she thought it was a bad thing, necessarily; she just didn't get it. I could never get her to play with me. Ever.

It kind of sucked considering how much I love my video games. I've often wished that she would share in the experience with me, but no such luck...until my Wii came along.

She had seen the ads on TV and said it looked “gimmicky.” While I didn't necessarily disagree with, I wanted a Wii in the worst way (having already made my informed decision between a Wii and a PS3. More on that later).

I happened to be at Wal-Mart (something I’m not proud of) at the exact time the electronics department got their shipment of three Wiis in. I, of course, tried to buy all three (hello eBay!) but they wouldn’t let me. I did score one for myself though.

I was so excited I literally almost hit another car on the way home, but as fate would have it, I arrived alive and immediately hooked up my Wii. My wife was there to witness the first game I played: Tennis from the Wii Sports disk. I played one best of three game. Needless to say, it was awesome.

Then I had the shock of my life.

“Let me play it once,” my wife said.

After I recovered from the initial astonishment that my wife was actually asking me to play a video game, I was faced with a serious dilemma. I had only played one game and she was asking me to give up the controller. Under normal circumstances my response would have been a heartfelt “Hell no!”

But this was my wife asking me if she could play a video game. This was something I had dreamed about for nearly a decade. I tenderly handed her the controller. She started to play. She started to smile. She busted out laughing. She was playing a video game and she was loving it.

I could have died a happy man right then and there. Fortunately, I continued on. We switched back and forth through the rest of the night, playing our way through the disk (she kicked my ass in bowling) and had a great time bonding over video games.

Finally, my dream was realized—but it kept getting better. My wife has generally regarded money spent on video games as totally wasted. That’s why I about fell over dead when she called me from the store a few days later to inform me that they had extra Wii remotes and ask if she should pick one up so we could play tennis against each other.

Uh, that would be a “yes." So she did. We even got "his and hers" colored skins for the remotes (blue and orange). Now we Wii together all the time. Life is awesome. Thank you Nintendo, for providing the Wii to a happy marriage.

Still trying to find a Nintendo Wii? Would you go to any lengths to get one? Really? Because a 28-year-old woman of Sacramento has died in a competition called "Hold your Wee for a Wii."

The people taking part in this competition were given eight ounce (225ml) bottles to drink every 15 minutes. They then moved on to larger bottles, according to fellow contestant James Ybarra, who managed five of the smaller bottles.

AP is reporting that the station said its staff were stunned at the death, but visiting the station's website, there doesn't seem to be any similar statement.

Last night during the season finale of one our country's greatest television shows, Dancing with the Stars, Nintendo debuted the first U.S. broadcast commercial for its upcoming Wii console, available this Sunday. The spot features two friendly Japanese fellows unexpectedly showing up at a random household and giving them a joyous afternoon of jumping around their living room playing the Wii, and secretly drinking their hosts' lemonade.

Don't know why I am bothering to recap it, you must have already seen it last night cause you were watching Dancing with the Stars like the rest of us. Of course.

All this afternoon the intrepid editors over at Gamespot are giving their brand new Nintendo Wii test unit a marathon workout. They've also opened up a video channel showing both the game screen and also the view of the editors figuring out how to use the Wiimote.

They are taking questions from the site in real-time, so if you are curious to see the Wii in action and can't wait until November 19th, then check it out.

Nintendo has posted a series of 8 videos showing the "experience" of playing their new Wii game console due November 19th. They're organized by country and have players of varied age and race enjoying their first time with the controller. The "revolutionary" concept of the Wii, contends Nintendo, is the physical movement involved with using the the new controller, the "Wiimote".

Whether the novelty of the game play revolutionizes how people interact with games or if the control scheme just becomes gimmicky and doesn't catch on remains to be seen, and played.

What's interesting is that you see only a tiny bit of actual game play video in these clips, the camera largely is pointed at the people as they play the game.

Check out the hot U.S. girl and the elderly Japanese couple who are so cute they must have been made in a Sanrio Cute Japanese Grandparents Factory™.

Want a shiny new Sony Playstation 3 or Nintendo Wii when they come out next month? Well, there's good news (if you want a Wii), and bad news (if you want a PS3).

Tuesday saw the first and seemingly only day of Sony Playstation 3 pre-ordering at U.S. Gamestop/EB Games stores. All pre-orders were sold within minutes. There is a possibility that this pre-order comprises the total of the first PS3 shipment, leaving many gamers out in the cold come November 17th.

Kotaku is among the handful of gaming and tech sites that have been tipped about the Gamestop/EB Games Nintendo Wii pre-order this coming Friday, October 13th. Reports that Nintendo is exceeding production expectations indicates that there might be more available Wii consoles at launch than the PS3.

Major retailer Best Buy is not taking pre-orders for either console.

We obviously didn't come to see this shitty movie

Gears of War, easily the most anticipated Xbox360 game this side of Halo 3 was shown to lucky gamers last week at “The Match Made in Hell”, a four-city Gears preview held after a showing of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre : The Beginning”. The preview and game play are drawing almost unanimously rave reviews from the fanboy faithful in attendance. No, not fainting or a riot, but pretty damn close.



Gears of War is first person shooter with heavy horror and team game play elements. The game’s lush graphics and the recent announcement that it would support multiplayer game play brought Gears of War's anticipation level to a fever pitch.

The game means much more to Microsoft’s Xbox360 platform than your average holiday season title. When the Xbox360 launched in November of last year, it drew criticism for not being a large enough step graphically from the original Xbox to warrant the “Next Generation” moniker. By default, Gears has inherited the responsibility of being the first “true” Xbox360 next generation title, the first to really use the 360’s full processing horsepower. With November’s release of Nintendo’s groundbreaking Wii console, and Sony’s controversy-plagued PS3, the need for the 360 to shine has never been more vital for Microsoft.

Will Gears cement the 360’s strong lead on competitors Sony and Nintendo in the current phase of the console wars, or will it end up being just another FPS death orgy? We’ll know soon enough; Gears of War goes on sale November 7th.

here's a look:

At long last we can finally put all the pricing and launch date rumors to rest. While Nintendo won't make an official US announcement until their press conference on Thursday, the New York Times is reporting the Wii will launch on November 19th, just in time for the holidays. Despite hopeful reports that the console would less for under $200, the true price rings in at $250. Compared to the PS3, which ships out just a few days prior to the Wii, the price is still a solid few hundred cheaper.

According to the article, Nintendo plans to announce a sports game bundle, WiiSports, that will be included in every Wii purchase to show off the full potential of the console's innovative controls. I seriously cannot wait to play these games. Having had the opportunity to play the Wii at E3 this year, I can honestly say it is exceptionally fun. The potential for party play is so great. And think of the fat kids out there! Exercise while gaming, yet not having to rely on DDR! Bonus! Games, likely 25-30 launching this year, are said to be priced at $50 a piece. And the highly anticipated Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess will indeed be available by end of year.

In a bit of a twist, the Wii is said to have web capabilities so one can browse the Internet via their television.

November 19th. Let the countdown begin!

(via joystiq)