Promotional Games

Promote your product from the best: making the audience have fun! Can you imagine your future customers spellbound for hours with your ad?

Original article By Sean Hollister posted Apr 17th 2011

Nintendo's kid-tested, researcher-approved Wii Balance Board has struck at the heart of the medical supply industry yet again -- this time, the Bluetooth-connected scale is being used to help physically challenged children at Shriners Hospital in Houston. Seniors at Rice University hand-machined a set of force-sensitive parallel bars and programmed a monster-shooting game called Equilibrium to get kids excited about improving their walking gait, where they can play and score points with each proper step they take. The game automatically ratchets up the difficulty as patients improve, and handrails will play a part too, with a custom three-axis sensor box able to detect how much patients rely on the parallel bars (and dock points accordingly) in an effort to improve their posture. Yep, that sounds just a wee bit more useful than the Balance Board lie detector or the Wii Fit Roomba. Video after the break.

simple question, yes or no?

i've searched for an answer to this question multiple times with no success

will there be the option to asign where the buttons[brakes, gas, clutch] are located on the controller?

i already posted this but you don't seem to want to answer it, should i take my unanswered question as a NO, SCREW THE HANICAP?

i'm disabled, C - 3,4 quadriplegic, no movement below my shoulders, and yes a dirt bike injury, i've played all the mx vs atv games with modified controllers as you can see in my picture and video, reflex gave very little control over modifing controller options and because of that i only have gas and steering, i play GRID and Dirt 2 made by Codemasters and in their controller options i'm able to change any button i want to be placed where i want on my controller, that allows me and many others out there to play the game the way it should be played, a better chance at being competitive with other, and most of all have fun

will ALIVE have more controller options? this would be a great benifit to many people that i alone know. hope that the answer is yes

happy st. patrick's day - sean kelley

xbox 360 user name: themxlab

MX vs ATV Alive "ask a question" forum

You probably already know this, but Super Mario Bros. turned 25 this year. What better way to commemorate the anniversary, than with a Kinect hack that uses your entire body to squash Goombas and defeat Bowser to save Princess Peach?

A gadget like the Kinect might get hacked in just a week's time, but it's not properly hacked until it can emulate Super Mario Bros. A programmer by the name of yankeyan didn't want to take the easy road and program a simulated keypad that he could press with his hands. That would be absolutely boring.

Now, using full body gestures? That's more like it. As you can see in this video, to make Mario jump, you need to jump. To move left, you need to move left, etc. The entire setup runs on a NES emulator for Windows and the open source Kinect driver, OpenKinect.

It's somewhat primitive, but boy, did we never see this coming. We doubt Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto saw this one coming either. Who knew that it would take 25 years to finally be able to be the little Italian plumber himself.

Article from DVICE.com

Armeo - robotic rehabilitation therapy for neurological movement disorders

About a year ago I had a chance to use this piece of equipment for about 20 minutes and it was challenging, fun, and with more time most likely effective. For those of you that don't know me I'm a C - 3, 4 incomplete quadriplegic. July 21st, 2010 will be my 12th year of paralysis, I have slight signs of muscle control in my biceps and triceps but nothing else below my shoulders. When I try to explain the Armeo and the feeling I say it gave my arm the feeling of weightlessness so the slightest muscle movement could be seen. I was able to move my right arm up and down with my shoulder muscles, push my arm forward and backward and the most impressive part to me side to side. One game was a 3 dimensional room and the object was to clean the white areas of the room with a sponge. There's a short clip in the video. To clean the room you need to be able to use all the movements I mentioned earlier, up and down to get the walls, forward and backward to get the sponge from the front of the room to the back and side to side to get the ceiling, floor, and back wall, very challenging. Another game I tried was catching water drops in a pail. That one worked more with the side to side movement. Another game that was hard but fun was the go-cart driving around, another short clip in the video. With this game pushing forward was the gas and side to side to steer. I'm sure this equipment isn't cheap but it sure would be nice to see at physical therapy rehabilitation centers around the world. Check out the video and give us your thoughts on it. Have you seen or used Armeo? Does it look like something you would use for physical therapy sessions? Will you buy me one? hahaha

Xbox 360 Kinect - Your Shape Fitness Evolved

Introducing Your Shape™: Fitness Evolved, a revolutionary fitness game for Kinect on Xbox 360®. Your Shape’s proprietary Player Projection technology puts your body into the game for the ultimate experience. You’ll control the game intuitively with your voice and body as you create your desired fitness experience. Choose a personal trainer to help you meet your specific fitness goals, take a Yoga or Martial Arts class, or play fun, family-friendly mini-games. As you exercise, you’ll receive specific feedback on your every move, thanks to the game's real-time precise tracking system. Plus, as you exercise, you’ll interact with captivating visual effects that respond to your movement and impact. Get ready to experience the evolution of fitness gaming! 

Exergaming Benefits by Stephen Yang at ExerGame Lab

• "Gets You in the Game" is a statement we've been using for a long time and it's good to see it throughout the press releases.
• A surprisingly strong Facebook community of 36,000 + seems like it has a good start on the maximizing the group's ability to support one another.
• Great visual effects and interaction and player tracking.
• Lots of great feedback (formative, summative, instant).
• Hundreds of exercises and supposedly never giving you the same workout.

 Exergaming Concerns by Stephen Yang ExerGame Lab

• As I have found in my research and that of others, perceived exertion is proving to be a tricky metric as people are under-reporting their levels of perceived exertion. This can lead to exhaustion and/or repeated overuse injuries.
• Although Your Shape: Fitness Evolved has evolved from the Wii version, I still don't like the computer generated "image" when compared to the your actual video like onEyeToy Kinetic (my gold standard for fitness video game).
• If it never gives you the same workout twice, what happens if you really connect with a particular workout and want to repeat it? Is there the option to put it back into rotation?
• With all the feedback coming from the program, will the user be able to customize the amount, delivery rate and or type (audio, visual)?
• Will players with movement disabilities be able to use the this system after calibrating for range of motion?
• Will we be able to move the camera closer so those with limited ROM can still "Be in the game"?
• Will the online support community run into similar litigation issues as EA SPORTS Active (featured earlier)
• Did the designers consult with exercise physiologists, strength training professionals, and personal trainers? 
• Did they build in features that emphasize: the different elements of training cycles (micro, macro, meso), energy systems (aerobic, anaerobic, lactic, alactic), tapering an cycling, nutritional demands coordinating with each specific cycle and system? 
• As is the case with many of the fitness "games", there does not appear to be any real game element in terms of story, plot, or narrative. In essence these titles should be "efitness instruction" or "efitness guides".
• The demo got me a little confused as it was the mirror image of what we were watching on stage.

Exergames of the future.

HardCORE Swimming is an Exertion Game prototype that combines the use of a Wii Fit balance board, Wii controller and nunchuk to swim through a shark-infested sea while collecting treasure.

read the full article and see video at Health Gamers

HealthGamers.com

New ExerGame project titled Hanging Off a Bar.

Hanging off a Bar tires one out on the hands, arms and stomach quite quickly. Luckily, from time to time, there is a raft in the form of a set of logs coming by in the river, and the player can jump on these to rest and recover, but not for too long, because the raft disappears in the waterfall behind, and the player has to jump back up. - from Exertion Interfaces

See a video and read about it here

Image from Exertion Interfaces website

I'm not sure why all games don't allow a gamer to change up their controller options but it sure does frustrate me. I play racing games for the most part on Xbox 360. Codemaster's GRID and Dirt 2 give me great options for control set up while Rainbow Studio's newest dirt bike game MX vs ATV Reflex's control set up is very limited. Previous versions of MX vs ATV did give the gamer more control over their controller options. Why did they take this great function away? I have no idea. I was injured crashing my dirt bike and now being a C 3-4 quadriplegic I use video games to get a feeling of being on a bike and it's upsetting to know that the game could have had these options but didn't care enough to include them. There is a MX vs ATV forum to post ideas for the game but my post in the "Idea Pit" went unanswered.

Chuck Bittner asks for game developers to spend the time to build remapping into their games, or for the console manufacturers to build the functionality into their hardware.

read article here