Pedal Your Way Through Quake

loteck writes: "Tom's previewed this latest toy that allows health savy gamers to peddle their way through flight simulators, racers and even first person shooters. Someone is providing a plethora of compatible games by which to Quake or Carmageddon yourself to that six-pack that you've always wanted." I wonder if this would burn more calories than the floor-pad from the old Nintendo system.

great concept

[rnd()]

I visited a health club that had a couple of old stationary bikes that were fitted with some kind of old tank combat game. Pedaling would determine how fast the tank moved, and buttons on the handle bars allowed for steering, firing, etc.

Usually my patience (and energy) runs out after about 30 minutes on a bike, but that day I 'played' for 2 hours.

Health clubs, maybe

[bloodmusic]

I think the market may not be the two or three people who would want to put an exercise bike in front of their computer, but maybe health clubs that would put a nice flat screen running a flight sim or Quake in front of one of those boring-ass exercise bikes.

games and attentionspan

[GW Hayduke]

sounds similar to a situation I found.
I always had a difficult time doing my 1/2 hour of Nordic Track for my physical Therapy after some knee surgery.. I tried putting in front of the TV for news/music videos/cartoons anything to take away the boredom and drudgery I felt with churning away in my own personal gerbil wheel.
Finally I picked up the controller of the Super Nintendo and put in Spiderman vs. Venom... voila... I found myself not even noticing the workout. After a while I found myself "skiing" faster during the battles and slower during the other parts of the game which was a better way for the heartrate.. I was attempting to wire the controls down to the "handles" of the NordicTrack when a bottle of water spilled over the SN system shorting it out for good. oh well

Flying

[Ratface]

There's an arcade game I've played before which features something like this (though more robust). In the game one flew a pedal-powered aircraft over a fantasy landscape and had to fly through dertain power-ups within a certain time limit to gain more flying time. I have NO idea what the game was called, but it was fantastic. Rather like I imagein Pilot Wings to be (though I admit to not hvaing played that!).

Pedalling harder meant one could ascend, pedalling slower meant one began to descend. The dynamics of the game were excellent.

Damn - I'm rambling now! Basically, I would want *that* game to go with this device.

Re:People will just cheat

[jandrese]

Several times? I seem to remember breaking a sweat pretty much every time I used that thing. Granted I wasn't the most athletic kid, but given that the shortest course in that track and field cartridge was apparently 10 miles long, I don't see how you could avoid breaking a sweat.

Of course we didn't cheat...much. Everytime it had you jumping some hurdle we'd quickly jump off the pad and back on. It made the game thing that you'd just jumped 20 feet in the air. :)

Still, remembering that pad made me wish DDR was invented sooner instead of the just plain awful Dance Aerobics cart.

Re:Not an effective workout

[ordinarius]

The system most of my cycling buddies with good jobs use is Computrainer [computrainer.com]. I've tried it and it is excellent. The cool thing about the system is that it very accurately adjusts the watts required. When the screen is showing hill, it hurts. Draft behind someone and it gets easier and so on. Also you put your standard bike in the stand as opposed to sitting on the couch. The real advantage here, I think is for doing interval training. Normally you warm up for 30 minutes or so and then go all out for 1 or 2 minutes then rest for 1 or 2 minutes and repeat over and over again. I'd rather not be on the road with cars towards the end of an interval and you can set it up to be very motivational.

On the downside it is very expensive, which makes it hard to justify. You don't steer, which I found strange. Seems like it would be easy to put you front wheel on a turntable like "mouse" and let you go where you want.

Ultimately it would be sweet to digitize a real bike race, so that the positions of all the riders are accurately known over the whole course. Then you could get on your Computrainer and try and keep up.

- ordinarius

speaking of burning calories...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ddrfreak.com/images/photos/eric-ddrdiet .jpg

This person lost 150 lbs playing Dance Dance Revolution =P

Integrated Exercise Cycle and 2-person Game

[cburley]

My wife and I visited a health club in Austin, TX while on vacation there a few years ago (one of the best "pure" vacations we've ever taken, by the way; Austin's beautiful, we stayed on the northwest side of town in the beautiful hills, visited Ladybird Johnson's wildflower reserve in the southwest, etc.).

They had a two-person videogame setup that you played by riding exercise cycles. The cycles were, IIRC, recumbant-style, with integrated "consoles" for the hands, the ability to tilt left and right to control steering, and feedback so the system knew how hard you were pedaling. (I don't recall it being able to dynamically adjust the resistance, though maybe it did.)

Of the four games offered, three were basically scenic two-person "outings" -- you could pedal around a mountain (ski simulation maybe?), around an island (including going underwater), and the third might have been a road-race kind of thing. In all three, you saw your partner/opponent as they pedaled around in your monitor, they saw you in theirs, in animated fashion of course.

But my favorite was the fourth game, where you actually competed with each other in some sort of Aztec or Mayan-inspired game where you were driving little carts that could push and shoot a ball through a stone hole up in two of the four slanted rock walls.

With this game, you really did get a lot of exercise, because the faster you pedaled, the quicker you got to the ball. Beating your opponent to the ball meant you could usually "grab" it (by running into it, basically) and run with it until you lined up a good shot and fired using the console. But your opponent could knock you about and, I think, knock the ball off and retrieve it for herself.

Watching the 3D rendering of the arena, the ball bounce around, learning how the cycle-powered simulated cart responded, all that meant both of us, who had already done a pretty good workout, pedaled ourselves silly for about half an hour. (Oh, the system allows for an RPM or resistance handicap -- at the time, that helped my wife compete, since she couldn't pedal as fast as I.)

Then we both got too dog-tired to go on, and basically crashed the rest of the day.

Ever since, we've occasionally talked about how wonderful it would be to have a system like that in our house somewhere, though ideally with more choices of games.

Personally, I am more likely to exercise harder in competive situations than just to burn calories, and I think that's true of my wife as well. So a game like that is great.

Whether the pedaling system described here is good enough, I don't know, but the game we played was, at least for that one time!