malloc Wii Fit

I knew I wanted to write a blog post today and I really had two choices.

1. Join in the debate over whether or not you need to know C in order to be a real programmer.

2. Talk about the Wii Fit

Lots of people are talking about choice number one. Well, perhaps talking isn’t the right word. Flaming? Fighting? Insulting one’s intellect? Yeah, any of those would do.

But we can bang that one out quick; here I’ll take a stand.

Do you know C? – Yep.

Have you programmed in C? – Double yep.

Have you programmed professionally in C? – Yes.

Would you do it again? – Wouldn’t be my first choice but sure why not?

Do you think programmers should know about pointers and memory management? – Couldn’t hurt them. Not that it makes it any fun though. Screwing that stuff up, and it always gets screwed up, results in errors in fun and terrible ways.

Ok, now that that is out of the way on to the Wii Fit. Thanks to the magic of Amazon pre-orders ours arrived yesterday morning. By the time I made it home from work my wife was actively playing the hula hoop game on the Bluetooth scale board thingie while my three and a half year old daughter was standing three feet to the side making hula hoop motions.

Somehow I think Mario Corp. has a winner here with the new to gaming/super casual gaming crowd.

(And what about the Wii Fit commercial with the woman busting out the Yoga? I’ll bet they sold an extra bazillion units on that alone.)

Now we ran through all the unlocked games and exercises last night, and I doubt that it will cause any kind of gastric bypass like results, but one thing does stand out. The silly thing is fun. Who would have figured, balancing on a couple of scales to roll a virtual ball on a virtual board through a virtual hole is in demand entertainment these days.

We’ll have to see how long it keeps our attention, but I suspect with a couple people in the same house playing it the novelty won’t wear off as fast. In fact, I’ll bet right now my high scores on the balance games are being mercilessly attacked while I am hard at work blogging, err, working.

Oh, and to complete the circle from earlier, like all games it’s probably written in C. So if being a real programmer means writing pseudo-exercise console games it looks like C is indeed required.

Well, it might also be C++, but that’s really just C with a compiler messages that read like you strangled a cat.