Our Olympics with Mario & Sonic

My family has been having a lot of fun with the Olympics. One thing that really helped my kids to be excited about the games was the fact that we got the video game "Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games" for Christmas. This is an "official" video game for the Vancouver games, so it uses the official logos and the actual names of the venues for the events. So going into the games, my kids already new about Cypress Mountain and such. Not to mention the fact that they have more of a knowledge of the events. So bravo to the Olympic committee and Nintendo for working together on this! If they goal was to raise the level of excitement about the games...it certainly worked in my household.

We decided that our family would have our own games by way of the Wii. Each member of the family has chosen a character and we will be competing in the various events. We are going to try and update the world through the blog and by the end will see who the Olympic champ of this house is. Timothy is playing as Shadow, Samantha is playing as Daisy, Mom is playing as her Mii character, and Dad (me) is playing as Luigi. Yesterday we began by competing in two events. First was the Skeleton.

The players shake the Wii-mote to start, push a button to hop onto the sled and then turn the Wii-mote side to side, trying to stay in the center yellow arrows to get the best speed. We did two runs each and used each persons best score to determine the rankings. In the end, Luigi had the best time, 1:10.287, to get the Gold. Shadow nabbed the Silver with a time of 1:13.557, and Daisy grabbed the Bronze with a time of 1:15.792.

Event 2 was figure skating. This is the part of this game that amazes me. I mean when I was a kid we were playing Space Invaders, now we actually have video game figure skating! We all did our routines to "Swan Lake" for this round (we may do more figure skating to other songs later). For figure skating you need to watch the prompts on the screen and move the Wii-mote up, down or spin it at just the right moment. Additional points are awarded for extra turns that you do throughout the routine. Sounds weird? Just check out Timothy's technique...he's a bit extreme but you get the idea.

The results were very different this time around. The top score was an amazing 98.900, giving the Gold to...Shadow! After a rough first round score, Mom's Mii came in a close second with a score of 98.200. Daisy grabbed the Bronze with a score of 89.400.

So after the first two events: Shadow has 1 Gold, 1 silver...Daisy has 2 Bronze...Mom's Mii has 1 Silver...and Luigi has 1 Gold. Stay tuned for more...not on the networks of NBC.