gaming

Jeremy
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BMI: Addendum

Over the Christmas holiday, I was rankled yet again by the inappropriate use of BMI (body mass index). As I mentioned in my previous discourse on the subject, BMI is a guideline for entire populations, not individuals. So imagine my surprise when Wii Fit told me I was significantly overweight due to my high BMI, and saw fit to change my Mii into a chubster. Guess what, Wii Fit? I’m not a spry Japanese man. I am an oversized American man of Scottish heritage, and my feet don’t fit on to your precious fucking balance board.

I’m especially disappointed with this application of BMI as a lot of kids play Wii Fit. BMI doesn’t take into account the physiques of children, which are markedly different, and apparently Wii Fit doesn’t take into account the physiques of Americans. Now, I don’t want to defend the US too vigorously, as we are a fat, fat country. Oh my are we ever rotund. But this is creating a weight problem where there is none. People are differently shaped. People from different parts of the world, doubly so. So maybe Nintendo takes a few extra days of programming time to come up with a slightly differently way to measure how overweight someone is for the sake of accuracy. Because now my Mii is much fatter than anyone on my brother’s Wii, and let’s just say that’s not necessarily the case in real life (sorry bro).

Jeremy
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Dirty Cheater

I’ve got a pretty long-standing love affair with video games. Although I liked playing them as much as most kids of the 80s, I think I can trace the obsession back to the fall of 1993. I was in sixth grade, and my friend Cliff bought Final Fantasy (the orig) for the NES at a garage sale for like $15. We played it for like ten hours straight – first at his house, and then Cliff coming back to my house to sleep over so we could keep playing. Computer games were a pretty big constant in my house with my programmer brother and former computer salesman father, but when I got the SNES (and later, the Playstation), my obsession exploded. If it was made by Squaresoft and released in America, I probably played and beat it at some point between 1995 and 1999.

This was more or less pre-Internet. Admittedly, I lived in a stronghold of tech nerds, so we had a modem back in 1990, when there was nothing to see, and I think I registered my first Yahoo! mail account in 1996. But when I say pre-Internet, I mean Internet as we know it now, a well-organized resource with thousands of people contributing information for no apparent gain. Which is to say, I beat most, if not all of these games, without consulting some kind of strategy guide or walkthrough. I believe I used to pride myself on the fact that I could make it through these games without resorting to buying the $15 guide most of my friends relied on. I’m pretty sure I considered that cheating. More

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