Wii The People

They’re having the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Baltimore today, but it’s cold and rainy out, so I guess I’ll just have to get sloppy drunk at home. If you drink enough, you can still see leprechauns.

I’m really enjoying my Wii. The boxing in particular has been most challenging. I did a little research on how to punch effectively and learned that you really shouldn’t be doing full punches yourself. Several sites explained that you can vary the type and location of your punches by flicking and twisting your wrists in different ways.

This may help my ranking as a Wii boxer, but it kind of saps the exercise value. See, I’m competitive enough that even if I’m just playing against the computer, I don’t want to suck, even if it’s for the benefit of more exercise. So I kind of do a hybrid of punching and flicking. The bobbing and weaving to avoid my opponent’s punches definitely helps the old waistline.

I’ve also come to learn how the ranking screen works. Each time you fight an opponent, your rank goes up or down, depending on how you do. The more convincing the win is, the greater the bump in rank. They always have you fight an opponent that’s ranked a little (or a lot) higher than you are. What really ticks me off is when you battle a very tough opponent, maybe get knocked down a couple times, yet come back and win, but you still lose rating points.

This happened to me yesterday… My rank is something like 730, and I was fighting someone ranked around 850. Tough fight, but I won in the third with a knockout. My rank stayed even. My thinking is that if you beat someone that much better, your ranking should rise regardless of how you did it. My overall record is something like 12-0-1. (I can’t believe I don’t have a spreadsheet for this yet.) But there were at least 3 or 4 wins where I lost points.

I also discovered the “Training” mode, where you can warm up by doing a number of drills. I especially like hitting the heavy bag. There, I can punch my heart out without worrying about losing ranking points and just focus on getting my heart rate up.

Best of all, I’ve developed the perfect time and place to do these workouts… during hockey game intermissions. As soon as they leave the ice, the game goes on and I can usually fit in 1 round on the heavy bag, 2 boxing matches, a little more on the bag, and maybe a tennis game or two.

It’s still kind of a kick seeing the little Mii that looks like Me running around and duking it out with all these characters. I totally feel like I let myself down when I’m knocked down in boxing. I’m also not crazy about the fact that sometimes I have to face female boxers. It’s not like I don’t still fight hard, especially after they start biffing mii around; it’s just that I feel guilty after knocking it out. I feel like I have to go and donate to the N.O.W. to make up for it.