We warned you about it way back in the high times of summer, and here it comes… Yoga for Wii! As if teachers and studios didn’t have enough to contend with in the age of Recession Yoga!
This isn’t your casual ‘Wii Fit yogi’ style, wedged alongside ski jumps and hula hoops. This is solely dedicated to the wholehearted home yogi.
In the new game the Wii Yogi can practice in three modes:
- training mode – which teaches you poses
- routine mode – allows you to create your own daily practice (we assume ‘save’ is an option) or use pre-created routines
- story mode – you start off as a novice and advance to guru (however that works, it’s not entirely clear)
This progress should be a happy pacifier to the loudest complaints about yoga in Wii Fit: the incessant pause after each pose creating an irritating hiccup in flow, and lack of possibility to string a sequence together. The use of the Wii Balance Board is still in play as a decoder of progress.
The new Yoga for Wii game is slated for release this October (rather than Q2 as earlier reported), just in time for early Christmas shoppers and yogi hopefuls who’ve already battered their ’09 budgets unrecognizable. The cost of the Nintendo Wii system ($250) and the game (probably in the $20-40 range) are a bargain compared to some studio memberships. We already know the Wii is perfect for Recession family fun and yogatainment.
Will people shutter themselves in their homes and become hermit yogis?
Is it wrong that we’re excited for this?
(by DreamCatcher Games and JoWooD Productions)
[Kotaku]
Earlier…Wii Yoga Coming Early 2009
honey, where ya been?!? I heard about Wii yoga last year from my college students.
On the first day of class I always ask if anyone has done yoga before. One guy said, yeah, on Wii. I said, what the hell is Wii? So he tells me how he did balance poses. I said, oh, OK, so you’ve never done yoga…..
On one hand, the Wii appeals to the masses and so it just might get more people interested in yoga. But I shudder when I think about people trying injury-prone poses like shoulderstand on their own – my chiropractor tells me that Wii yoga is great for his business!