Slashdot Mirror
New Gamepad Designed To Build Muscles?
Robmonster writes "The BBC are reporting a story about a product designed to address both exercise and videogaming in one fell swoop. According to the piece: 'A new type of gamepad from a US fitness equipment company aims to turn the couch potato gamer stereotype on its head. The Kilowatt controller by Powergrid Fitness is designed to build up muscle while playing a PlayStation 2, Xbox or PC game." The article explains: "In a racing game like Gran Turismo, the harder you push on the joystick, the faster a car goes, while pulling back slows down the vehicle."
Some friends of mine and I took turns trying this device out at CES running Gran Turismo. It looked like all games should work on it, because it has a full complement of PS controls and buttons on it, including dual shoulder buttons. The consensus among the group after using it for a few minutes each? BLECH! I found it unintuitive as to how to move the device to control the car in a specific direction. It sort of made sense, but required hitting one of the gamepad buttons to put the car into reverse or to perform any of the other actions that games require during play. So, that meants that during your "strenuous" workout driving the car around, you would have to jump out of the workout abruptly to get the car back onto the road if you got turned around, then start back up again. I suppose if a game were built specifically for the device, then a continuous workout could be achieved, otherwise I thought it required too much switching between working out and playing the game. Having used this thing and DDR dance pads I can say with certainty that DDR integrates working out with fun gameplay FAR better than this device. If I may quote the horse from classic Ren and Stimpy, "No sir, I don't like it!"