Your Shape Review
Mar 10, 2010 Product Review, What's Going On
Your Shape Challenge Update
I’ve been part of the Your Shape Challenge for the past eight weeks, and while I’ve mentioned the game a lot and talked about a few different aspects of it, I haven’t really done a full review, so the people running the challenge have asked me to do one.
First of all, I should mention that since the challenge started, I’ve lost ten pounds. At this point that’s two pounds more than my goal, which was to lose one pound a week. And of course I can’t attribute all that to the Your Shape game – I’ve been eating 1,500 calories or less whenever I can manage it (I’d say that was roughly five out of the eight weeks), drinking more non-carbonated liquids (that would be watered-down Crystal Light, averaging about 24 ounces a day) and just generally trying to be more active. But on top of that, I’ve been exercising with Your Shape two or three times a week (except during those three weeks when I wasn’t eating well – see how that works?!?). I feel stronger, and with the weather getting warmer I’m also going to incorporate some jogging into my routine in addition to Your Shape. All of those things together have combined into a pretty smooth and painless ten pound loss. I haven’t done anything at all drastic, I haven’t been at all miserable, and I’m fitting very comfortably into my size 14 pants – a couple of them are even too big. That’s been the great thing about this challenge: the people running it never said “Go use the Your Shape game twelve times a week and then tell us how much weight you’ve lost.” They understand that it’s part of some over-all changes that are helpful for losing weight.
The Your Shape Game
So, the game itself: to recap, there’s a little camera that sits either on top or at the bottom of your TV and connects to your Wii, and that camera shows you onscreen in the Your Shape game. You’re on the right side of the screen, and a Jenny McCarthy avatar is on left, talking to you and showing you what to do. The goal is to mimic what she’s doing. It’s not a good idea to stare at yourself in the game for two reasons: #1, there’s a tiny bit of lag between what you’re doing and what you see on the screen, which will mess you up. And #2, you’ve really got to watch Jenny. So why have the camera at all? That also has two reasons: #1, you can see if you’re doing what you should be doing: getting your legs up high enough, getting your arms straight enough, etc. In fact, I discovered pretty early on that if I thought my arms were straight out, they were actually hanging down a surprising amount.
Reason #2 for the camera is the whole point of this game: it tells you how well you’re keeping up with Jenny, and you don’t have to hold anything or strap anything to your body. The camera just reads it. It took me a few tries to get it positioned right. I started out with it at the top of my TV, and that was no good – it was telling me that I was only doing the exercises about 50% right, and I knew I was doing better than that. Then I moved it below the TV, and it got a lot more accurate. Finally I got it positioned just right at the very front of my TV shelf, and it reads me really really well – I’m consistently between 80 and 90%. If it’s telling me that I’m doing an exercise 85% right and I concentrate on getting my arms up a little higher, I watch the % tick up a few numbers. If I try to slack off a little, I get almost instant feedback telling me that I need to focus. It’s like having an aerobics instructor in front of you, except you don’t have to put on a perky spandex outfit and leave your house.
The one thing that the camera doesn’t read so well is the floor exercise portion. My % score usually drops by about ten as soon as the workout moves to the floor. But, like that five pound weight gain that I get every single month when I have my period, I just expect it and ignore it. The other problem with the floor exercises is that often you’re supposed to have your head down, or even turned away from the TV, and Jenny does not do a good job telling you that you need to change sides or do the next rep. For the next version of the game I think the designers really need to focus on those exercises that need more audio cues, and have Jenny count you down and tell you to change sides and all that, every time. This is never a problem with the standing exercises though, only the floor exercises.
My favorite part of the whole thing is that you get to choose which muscle group you really want to work on, and then get to further choose between burn, strengthen, or tone. I mean, all of your muscles are going to get some kind of work out, but if you choose abs, expect a lot of crunches and double leg lifts. If you choose legs, you get less floor work and more jumping. And if you own hand weights, a balance ball, or an aerobic stepper platform, the game will incorporate those into your routine as well. Whatever I choose, there’s good variety and after eight weeks I’m not at all tired of the exercises. There are muscle groups I’ve never chosen, so I’m sure there are a lot more exercises for me to explore.
The workouts that I’m getting are intense. I almost always do a 30 minute routine, and the first 20 minutes just kill me – constant movement. After that it slows down a bit, with some floor work and more breaks. At the end I’m always sweaty, a little out of breath, and tired – just what I want from a workout. I never felt that tired after a workout DVD, and I realize now it’s because I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough. It’s so easy to slack of when nobody’s telling you that you are. As hard as I’m working, though, one small thing on the game that just seems wrong is the calorie counter. It will tell you how many calories you’ve burned, but it will lie. Monday, for example, I did a 30 minute burn routine focusing on legs. It was intense, and I absolutely got a great workout. But there’s no way that I burned over 600 calories in 30 minutes. I would only burn half of that jogging. So until they fix that equation, ignore it.
There are other parts of the game that I don’t really use. For example, there are challenges that can get you ready for a bathing suit, a New Year’s resolution plan, and a de-stressing challenge that’s basically yoga. My daughter loves to do that one. I set her up with her own profile so that she would stop messing with mine, and she’ll do yoga for an hour at a time.
To sum up, I would definitely recommend this game for anyone wanting a tiring routine with lots of variety. You’ve got the freedom to move around without holding a controller, and the added motivation of seeing yourself on camera. It’s helped me get stronger and smaller during the coldest part of winter, a time when I usually wouldn’t be getting any purposeful exercise at all.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 & 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
Tags: Jeny McCarthy, Wii, Your Shape
Win a Your Shape to get yours in shape!
Feb 24, 2010 Contest/Giveaway, Weight Loss
UPDATE: Congratulations to the winner of the Your Shape game, Christine W.!
The Challenges
So I completely killed the week five challenge for the Your Shape challenge that I’m participating in. The ten participants get weekly challenges, like drink more water (which I did OK at, not great) or walk 10,000 steps a day (which was easy when I was at home, not so much when I was sitting my ass in sessions at the Blissdom conference). But week five I was awesome on. OK, I really didn’t do anything special at all, it’s just that the challenge was to get outside every day, getting some kind of exercise, even if it was only for ten minutes. And it was the week that I was at Disney World. I walked miles and miles around the parks every day. If that challenge had happened last week, though, I would have totally lost. My family was out of town and I didn’t leave my house for four solid days. I would make an awesome hermit. That is, as long as I had access to the internet and could have things delivered to me.
Anyway, the week six challenge was to be innovative with healthy snacking. Each participant was given a Wal-Mart gift certificate to buy food to make the snacks. Only problem was, there’s no Wal-Mart anywhere near me, and they don’t sell food online. So, instead, I tried to stick to the spirit of the challenge, and I bought a few things that would help me to eat at home more. When I go out to eat, I tend to go a little crazy. It’s not that the food I’m eating is necessarily all that terrible, it’s just that I have no way of knowing the calorie content. So, I usually say “screw it” and eat whatever. Therefore, the more I eat at home, the more likely I am to eat less and better. So, I bought three things to help me cook at home more, stuff that I love to get at restaurants. That way, I can control what goes into it and know exactly how many calories I’m eating.
I love getting sandwiches in restaurants, they’re just fancier than what I make. So I bought a cast-iron panini press. I love getting nice, creamy soups in restaurants, and I like to make homemade soup but I hate cleaning my blender, so I bought an immersion blender. And last, my kids – Jake especially – are always dragging me to the coffee shop for Belgian waffles, so I bought a waffle iron. Besides eating better, I’m hoping I’ll save a little money too!
The Giveaway
What I love about the Your Shape Challenge is that it involves more than just the game. Drinking more water, walking more, these things all contribute to healthy living and weight loss. But the heart of the challenge, of course, is the Your Shape game for the Wii. And I get to give one away! (Sorry, Wii not included.)
All you have to do to enter is leave a comment stating what you weight loss or health goal is: lose ten pounds, be able to do a pull-up, walk up stairs without getting winded, etc. For a second entry, you can tweet about this giveaway (don’t forget to leave a separate comment linking to your tweet or it won’t count; instructions on how to link to your tweet can be found here). Just make sure to mention what the prize is and link back to this post, or you can just copy and tweet this:
Win a #YourShape exercise game for Wii from @SelfishMom! http://bit.ly/9se1iF
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household, please. The comments will close at noon-ish on Friday, February 26th and random.org will draw the winner. Contest open to residents of the U.S., and shipping is available in the continental U.S. only. Entrants must be 18 years or older. For complete rules, please see my Giveaway Rules page.
Good luck!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 and 10. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Wii, Your Shape
Weight Loss Tuesday: Hitting the Road
Feb 3, 2010 Weight Loss
Travel is scaring me
I’ll be out of town for most of the next two weeks. That’s a little scary for me right now. I panic when I’m in situations where I can’t count calories, say “screw it” and go crazy. I also have a hard time passing up free food and buffets, and the next two weeks will be filled with both. But I’ve laid a good foundation over the past few weeks and hopefully I’ll be able to stay on track. I have no illusions about losing weight with all this travel though – if I come out even I’ll call it a win and be thrilled. I lost less than a pound this week, but I’m not surprised. It’s that time of the month, you know what I’m talking about. I’m only not naming it so as not to attract weird googlers.
So this past week, the third week of the Your Shape Challenge, has been really good. I did manage to get in three 30-minute Your Shape workouts, which was my goal. I also went ice skating last week, which worked some leg muscles that hadn’t been worked in a while. However, I’m going to be without my Wii for five out of the next seven days. If I can get in two 30-minute Your Shape workouts in the next week, I think that will be an accomplishment. I’m going to try to get in a little exercise on the road, but it’s never happened before so I’m trying to manage my expectations rather than set myself up for failure. In other words, I’m setting the bar low in the hope that I can leap over it with ease.
I made my water goal three days this week, and not coincidentally it was the same three days that I worked out. I need to stop thinking about drinking water (and yes, by that I mean Crystal Light) only when working out. I feel better when I drink more water. It’s such a no-brainer I don’t know why I struggle with it. But I’m going to bring my little “On the Go” packets of Crystal Light with me. Don’t worry, I won’t take them in my carry-on. I don’t want to be arrested at the airport for carrying a suspicious red powder.
This week’s challenge: step to it
The Your Shape challengers have a new challenge this week, and that’s to walk as many steps as possible each day. To help us keep track we were each sent a pedometer, and I’ve been wearing mine faithfully for the past two days, despite a few close calls where I almost dropped it in the toilet. It’s going to happen eventually. Whether or not I rescue it depends on what it lands in. :-) Yesterday I walked just a few hundred steps shy of 10,000 steps, which is the magic number that’s always thrown around about how active a person should be. I almost got there even though the only time I left the house yesterday was walking the kids to school and picking them up. At home, I’m always going up and down the stairs and all over the place, so it was pretty easy. Today was even easier. I went into the city with the kids, and we did a good deal of walking. I’m over 14,600 steps right now and not quite done yet – hoping to hit 15,000 before I fall into bed.
So, things have been going well. Pretty easy. I’m really glad that this all started during a really busy, crazy time for me. If I had more time to pay attention to the challenge, I’d probably over-do it in the beginning and then flame out. Instead I took things slow, and I’m still going strong. At the end of the day My Food Diary tells me when I will reach my goal if I ate the same way every day. Today it told me that I would reach my goal on my birthday, which is in October. Far off, yes, but I really feel like I could keep this up until then. What a great birthday gift that would be.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Crystal Light, Wii, Your Shape
Weight Loss Tuesday: I Suck (but you get a giveaway)
Jan 19, 2010 Contest/Giveaway, Product Review, Weight Loss
So the first week of the Your Shape Challenge is coming to an end. I did the exercises on the Wii the first day of the challenge. Actually, technically, the second, because I waited until after midnight. Typical.
I had people in my house all week installing things, and the Wii is right next to the kitchen. After doing the Your Shape exercises the first time I swore that I could never EVER do them in front of other people. Not even my kids. I always suspected that I looked like a dork while exercising, but with the Your Shape thing I actually get to see myself on camera and confirm my dorkness. And it’s way worse than I thought. So all week I used the installation guys as an excuse why I couldn’t do it, and then on the weekend my family was home the whole time. I told myself whatever I had to tell myself to get out of exercising.
So this morning, I told myself that I couldn’t write my Weight Loss Tuesday post until I had some good exercise news to report. I was home alone all day. There was no excuse not to do it. But I still didn’t do it.
There is some good news. My eating was great all week, and I lost over four pounds. I’m guessing most of it was water weight – that always happens the first week I start eating less – but still, it felt good to step on the scale. That’s even more amazing considering I can’t really cook without a kitchen sink to wash pots and pans in. I’ve eaten a lot of frozen and take out, but logged all of it in My Food Diary and stuck to 1,500 calories every day but yesterday, when I had a huge diner lunch, but that was practically the only thing I ate all day, so I still stayed reasonably withing my calories. Good week for eating. Bad week for exercise. Better than bad for both.
But, history has shown me that I need to do both. So, this is a new week and I’ll take things one day at a time.
I’ve also been given a challenge by the people behind the Your Shape Challenge, to drink more water. Well, in my case, that would be to drink water, period. I hate drinking water. Pretty much the only time I drink it voluntarily is after I exercise, and well, see the above paragraphs. But I’ve been assured that adding some Crystal Light powder to my water counts, so that will help me get through.
I think telling myself that I was going to exercise six days a week was just setting myself up for failure. This week, I’m going to shoot for three. Baby steps.
The Giveaway
So, when I stepped on that scale last week for my initial weigh-in and yesterday for my one-week check, it was a beautiful new scale, the EatSmart Digital Bathroom Scale. It has a really elegant design that makes me want to leave it in the middle of the living room, not hide it away in the bathroom. But since I weigh myself naked, that’s probably not a good idea. :-)
It has a large, back-lit display and turns off automatically to save batteries. I tested it out against my old ugly warhorse of a scale, and it weighs very accurately. Did I mention how pretty it is?
I’m enjoying using mine, and one of you will get one for yourself. To enter to win, all you have to do is go to the EatSmart site and take a look at their products, then come back here and leave a comment stating what you think is the most useful feature on any of their products.
For a second entry, you can tweet about this giveaway (don’t forget to leave a separate comment linking to your tweet or it won’t count; instructions on how to link to your tweet can be found here). Just make sure to mention what the prize is and link back to this post, or you can just copy and tweet this:
Win an EatSmart Digital Bathroom Scale from @SelfishMom http://bit.ly/8FJTbx
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household, please. The comments will close at noon-ish on Monday, January 25th and random.org will draw the winner. Shipping available in the continental U.S. only. For complete rules, please see my Giveaway Rules page. Good luck!
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1 (Your Shape game) and 10 (Eat Smart Scale). Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
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Tags: Wii, Your Shape Challenge
Weight Loss Tuesday: I will do anything to avoid working out
Jan 13, 2010 Product Review, Weight Loss
I just did my first “Your Shape” workout for the Wii. It was hard.
I agreed to do a three-month weight loss/fitness challenge with nine other women. The great folks at Nintendo recently sent me a Wii, so I jumped at the chance to use it to get fit when the “Your Shape” opportunity came along. I could have gone out and bought the game myself, but it’s about more than that: it’s about motivation. I’ve been in a slump for the past few months, weight-loss wise. So I thought that maybe some friendly competition would help. We’ll see.
Today was the official start of the challenge, and I spent the whole day avoiding it. I had a couple of guys in my house installing a kitchen for most of the day, then the kids were home and it was time to do homework and go to Tae Kwon Do and out to dinner at Subway (we have no kitchen right now, and really won’t for at least a couple of weeks). Then it was bedtime for the kids, and time to work out. So what did I do? I caulked the front door. Then I cleaned up the living room. That delay was excusable, because I knew that I’d need room to exercise – the kitchen stuff was encroaching on the living room, not to mention the fact that my bags from the Vegas trip were still sitting in the middle of the floor. But by the time I was done tidying up the room, it was almost midnight and I knew that if I didn’t do the workout then, it wouldn’t happen and I’d have messed up on the very first day.
The game comes with a camera, and it captures your moves as you work out. There’s a little Jenny McCarthy avatar on the left side of the screen, and then you’re on the right side. And Jenny talks to you. A lot. I would have been happy with less of Jenny talking. I’ll have to experiment with the game and see if that’s possible. I want the feedback – the whole selling point of the game is that it tells you whether or not you’re doing the workout moves right, and motivates you along the way. But I don’t need a constant flow of chatter.
Or do I? Trying to do better when Jenny told me I wasn’t raising my arms high enough or squatting low enough not only kept me motivated, but it helped pass the time quicker. What I look for in a workout is something that distracts me from the fact that I’m working out. Often this means TV or music, but with this game it means yelling at the TV and trying to match exactly what the avatar is doing. Whatever works.
I was surprised at how well the camera picked up my movements. There’s actually a visual lag between what I’m doing and what shows up on the screen, but that doesn’t seem to be affecting the game – the game is “seeing” what I’m doing more accurately than what I’m seeing on the screen, so I just look at Jenny instead of myself, only glancing at my side of the screen every now and then to make sure I’m in the frame.
The game shows you the number of calories you’re burning as you go along, but I think the count is a bit high. While I would love to burn 200 calories in fifteen minutes, I’m guessing it was closer to 100. But I did get a good workout. My heart rate was up, I was sweating, and now I have that “heavy” feeling in my arms and legs that I know will translate to some soreness tomorrow. While I’m fairly active in my daily life – lots of walking and stair climbing – this was using different muscles, muscles that have been taking it easy for a while. Time to wake up.
The real test will be if I keep doing it. Since I started the actual workout part after midnight, the workout was counted for Wednesday on the game’s calendar. I think I’m going to take advantage of that and take tomorrow off, and let my muscles rest. :-)
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Jenny McCarthy, Nintendo, Wii, Your Shape
Weight Loss Tuesday: Resolutions are not for me
Jan 5, 2010 Weight Loss
I think my brain works differently than most people’s. The few times I’ve made eating and exercise resolutions they’ve gone something like this: I start strong on January 1st, do OK on January 2nd, and falter on January 3rd. Having messed up my brand-spanking-new resolution, I vow to start fresh on the following Monday. I do, and last until Tuesday. So I decide to give myself the rest of the month off and start fresh February 1st. When that doesn’t work, I say “screw it” and give up until the next year.
I’ve learned that I can’t be specific. If I say I’m going to exercise six times a week and I only exercise four, I feel like a complete failure. Forget about the fact that I just exercised four times! That doesn’t matter, because I had set a very specific goal and had missed it. Stupid, I know. But I’m nearing forty and I’m pretty sure my brain is not going to start working differently all of a sudden, so I’ve learned to work with it. I can make broad resolutions, like last year’s to try and do things I don’t want to do before I do the things I want to do. Vague enough that it was hard to break in such a way that I would beat myself up, but important enough that it did some good.
So, no weight loss resolutions. My one resolution was to do what I say I’m going to do. And I haven’t said what I’m going to do yet.
[Update: Someone just pointed out that I did make a weight-loss-ish resolution, very publicly, in a video that started running today on many many websites. Oops. Look to the right and you'll see the JuiceBoxJungle video widget. As of today, my face is on it. So I didn't eat the rest of the mozzarella sticks that are in the kitchen. Because I'm not hungry. But dammit I want them!]
I did say yes to trying out a Wii exercise program for three months. Nintendo sent my family a Wii last week, so the Your Shape exercise program was my first purchase for it (courtesy of Ubisoft and Collective Bias). It’s a motion control camera that plugs into the Wii, so that I won’t have to hold a controller or wear anything in order to exercise with the Wii – the camera sees what I’m doing! It should be waiting for me when I get back from the Consumer Electronics Show. I can’t wait to try it. I’ll need it after being in the land of buffets for five days.
For extra motivation, I joined the “Loser Moms” contest. A $10 buy-in gets you a chance to win cash for losing the most weight. I like money, so that should be good motivation. Plus there seems to be a lot of gratuitous swearing connected to the contest. I like that.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Nintendo, Ubisoft, Wii, Your Shape
“Princess and the Frog” Review and a Big Disney Giveaway
Dec 11, 2009 Contest/Giveaway, Product Review, What's Going On
The Movie
The kids and I went to a media screening of The Princess and the Frog a few weeks ago, and I’d be thrilled to go back and buy tickets for all of us now that the movie is open. It was fantastic.
I love Disney’s princess movies. They’ve got the formula down: Girl, missing a parent or two, has a dream. Girl shows her spunk, sings some songs, things get really bad, then girl achieves her dream and lives happily ever after. I cry into my popcorn. DVD comes out, repeat. The deciding factor for me with Disney has always been the music. It’s what sets the “just OK” Disney movies apart from the great ones. Great Disney songs tell a story, they don’t stop the action to comment on it. Those radio-ready songs re-sung by pop stars over the credits are the ones that really get to me (in a bad way). I can imagine a bunch of suits in a conference room, checking items off of a list, saying “OK, and we have to make sure we get a song on there that will sell the records. Get [insert pop flavor-of-the-month here] to sing it and then shoehorn it into the plot somewhere.”
It’s also no coincidence that the closer pop stars get to actually writing the songs in a Disney movie, the less likely I am to like the movie as a whole. I love Elton John, Phil Collins and Sting for many other things, but I don’t want them near Disney musicals. I don’t care how many awards they win. Randy Newman though, who did the music for The Princess and the Frog, he’s kind-of a wild-card for me. I love his scoring, and I think he does a great job on some songs. But some of his music, especially in Pixar movies, has just annoyed the crap out of me. It’s probably better that I went into the screening totally unaware that he had done the music. I absolutely loved it and was shocked to find out he was responsible. (By the way, I just downloaded the entire Princess and the Frog score from Randy Newman’s site, for free.)
I know nothing about music in New Orleans’ French Quarter, so I won’t even “educate” myself over on Wikipedia and try to pretend, telling you how the score echoes the sounds of this or that bayou musician. I’ll just say that it feels right. And with such a new setting for Disney, the music is very different than what they’ve gotten to explore before. The singing is fantastic and I can’t wait to hear it again.
The other thing that Disney tends to get right is the voice casting. In a cartoon that can be everything. I love George Clooney, but I don’t need animated characters to sound like him. I want the right voice actor for the job, not someone a studio thinks will get adults to bring their kids to the theater. I like seeing good movies, no matter what the subject or who’s in them. Give me a good kids movie and I’ll see it twice, in order to avoid sitting through video-game ready crap. The voices in this are really great. They helped me care about the characters, wondering what happened to them after the lights went back on and we had to leave the theater. Coupled with the animation – the beautiful, drawn, old-school animation – this is destined to be a classic.
I can’t really speak about the racial tensions that have been swirling around this movie since long before its release. I’m a middle-class white woman, and while I’ve never felt that the Disney Princesses represented me in any way either (they’re all thin, impossibly beautiful, great dancers, and have a rapport with woodland animals I’ve never been able to master), this is an issue that I just don’t feel qualified to comment on. I did find it interesting that the movie didn’t match a black princess with a black prince, instead partnering Princess Tiana with a prince from a made-up country that’s vaguely middle-eastern but with sort-of a Spanish accent. But I will say that as far as messages go, the main one was spot on: If you have a dream, work hard for it. The too-good-to-be-true, easy way out is usually anything but.
The Giveaway
Around the same time we saw the movie we also went to a video game preview for a wide variety of Disney video games. The kids had a blast trying out several different games, and I especially liked the Disney Sing It game for Wii
We left the event with a fantastic bag of games, and even better we also got to take two to give away! So two winners will each receive a Disney Interactive Studios tote bag with the following:
- The Princess and the Frog game for DS
- Princess and the Frog measuring spoons
- Toy Story Mania game for Wii
(not pictured)
- Disney Sing It game for Wii
- Tinkerbell and the Lost Treasure for DS
, in a beautiful wooden box
- Pixie Hollow hardcover blank book
- Jonas Brothers game for DS
- Jonas Brothers mousepad
- A Christmas Carol game for DS
- The Wizards of Waverly Place game for DS
- Split Second t-shirt (not pictured)
To enter to win, all you have to do is leave a comment stating your favorite Disney movie of all time. For the record, mine keeps shifting between The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But now I’ll have to add The Princess and the Frog to that list and they can all battle it out.
For a second entry, you can tweet about this giveaway (don’t forget to leave a separate comment linking to your tweet or it won’t count; instructions on how to link to your tweet can be found here). Just make sure to mention what the prize is and link back to this post, or you can just copy and tweet this:
Win one of two great Disney video game packs for Nintendo Wii & DS from @SelfishMom! http://bit.ly/7q7KEN
So, that’s a maximum of two entries per household, please. The comments will close at noon-ish on Wednesday, December 16th and random.org will draw the winner. Shipping available in the continental U.S. only. For complete rules, please see my Giveaway Rules page. Good luck!
Thanks so much to Disney and Nintendo for the great prizes.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1, 8 and 10. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Disney, DS, Nintendo, Princess Tiana, Randy Newman, The Princess and the Frog review, Wii
Tony Hawk: RIDE available today!
Nov 17, 2009 Product Review
Last month Activision flew me and my kids out to California for an amazing weekend. We visited Tony Hawk’s skateboarding facility in San Diego, where we got to watch him and some friends skate and bike, which was worth the cross-country trip all by itself.
Then we got to hang out with him and play his new video game, Tony Hawk: Ride
And of course, we got to see Tony Hawk show off his moves on his own game:
Then we had dinner with Tony Hawk. I felt like the luckiest mom in the world. And the best part about it was, Tony Hawk was totally into it. He didn’t act like he wanted to be somewhere else, he really seemed to enjoy watching our kids play the game. He was involved in creating the game start to finish, so it must have been pretty cool for him, after years of development, to watch real kids play RIDE.
When I was a kid, video games were something you played when you didn’t want to be active. I sat my ass in front of video games for as long as my parents could stand it. But now, it seems like the most exciting video games get you off of the couch and moving around. Tony Hawk: RIDE comes with a motion-sensitive skateboard (sans wheels, of course) that you “ride.” There are different levels, so whether you’ve never been on a skateboard (me) or you’re great at real life skating, the game is easy to get started on. There are great tutorials in the game that teach you how to do different maneuvers. As you get better, you can make things more challenging for yourself.
Activision was nice enough to send us the game a little early so that we could have some kids come over and try it. It was a good mix of kids, girls and boys around my son’s age. Some had skateboarding experience, some didn’t. I was a little worried about having so many kids sharing one game, but my son somehow knew about a “party mode” on the game (I swear, he learns this stuff in his sleep) which was absolutely perfect: each kid got a number from one to eight, and they took turns. Brilliant.
The kids were at our house for more than three hours, and most of them never left the game for more time than it took to run to the food table and back. We had back-up plans for other games they could move on to, but we never even came close to needing them. My daughter, who is five, and another girl her age were the only ones who had no interest in the game (Fiona didn’t want to try the game in California either) and they went upstairs to play with dolls. So for kids who prefer purses and nail polish to video games and sports, this might not be the game for them. But of the rest of the kids, most stayed glued to the game for the entire party.
Now that this video-game skateboard exists, I can see it expanding to other board-based games. Snowboarding and surfing are a couple of things that come to mind. If Activision needs any help developing games, I’m sure I’ll be their first call. :-) Until then, start with this game. Buy it now before the Christmas rush, because I really think that Tony Hawk: RIDE is going to be a super-hot in demand game this Christmas.
The luckiest kids in the skateboarding world:
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has Compensation Levels of 1, 7 and 8. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
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Tags: PlayStation 3, Tony Hawk RIDE, Wii, Xbox 360
