Asher, Wii Bowler
I wanted to put in some clarification about Wii bowling in particular, because it's led to a whole new form of daddy son interaction.
First, let me start off with the fact that Wii bowling physics are awesome, by which I mean "not very realistic." It's like awesome martial arts, or awesome chinese food, not awesome TV (meaning, apparently, not understandable by the vast majority of Americans) or awesome music (meaning I like it.)
Anyway, Asher's figuring out bowling really means he's come up with some slightly spastic way of grabbing the remote with both hands, bending over and standing back up. About 50% of the time his random button pushing produces a forward going ball, though this number is improving rapidly (as are his scores) but in general means the ball travels down the lane about as fast as downtown Chicago rush hour traffic. At that speed, once his ball makes contact with the pins, it shifts quite a bit right to left, since it doesn't actually have enough momentum to keep going straight after contact with the enemy.
(This is, of course, in stark contrast to my Wii bowling style, which has evolved from a nuanced, practiced, carefully spun throw to a heave-the-ball-as-hard-as-I-possibly-can-in-the-hopes-of-accidentally- losing-control-of-the-remote-and-breaking-my-TV for reasons we'll discuss shortly.)
It also means that it takes him about eight minutes to bowl ten frames. Which leads to the following babysitting tactic:
What I started to notice was that despite his lack of ball speed, my son is only about 10-30 pins behind me per game of power bowl (I usually score about 400-450, he scores 400-430). Very occasionally he beats me.
After watching, I see that it's because if you start your ball going (regardless of speed) it keeps going that direction. No friction loss, no curving of the lane.
After realizing this, I realized that if I basically just threw the ball as hard as I could, I could actually lift pins into the air. In power bowl mode, I basically now just try to get as many pins to ricochet around as possible, in hopes of knocking everything down. Plus, this maximizes blogging/surfing time.
Now, my son has tired of bowling and wants to play Wii baseball, which takes the same amount of time for both of us, so....
I'm out.
First, let me start off with the fact that Wii bowling physics are awesome, by which I mean "not very realistic." It's like awesome martial arts, or awesome chinese food, not awesome TV (meaning, apparently, not understandable by the vast majority of Americans) or awesome music (meaning I like it.)
Anyway, Asher's figuring out bowling really means he's come up with some slightly spastic way of grabbing the remote with both hands, bending over and standing back up. About 50% of the time his random button pushing produces a forward going ball, though this number is improving rapidly (as are his scores) but in general means the ball travels down the lane about as fast as downtown Chicago rush hour traffic. At that speed, once his ball makes contact with the pins, it shifts quite a bit right to left, since it doesn't actually have enough momentum to keep going straight after contact with the enemy.
(This is, of course, in stark contrast to my Wii bowling style, which has evolved from a nuanced, practiced, carefully spun throw to a heave-the-ball-as-hard-as-I-possibly-can-in-the-hopes-of-accidentally- losing-control-of-the-remote-and-breaking-my-TV for reasons we'll discuss shortly.)
It also means that it takes him about eight minutes to bowl ten frames. Which leads to the following babysitting tactic:
- start Wii bowling in power bowl practice mode
- bowl first (takes about 80 seconds to do all ten frames)
- sit down and blog about Wii bowling while waiting for son to bowl for eight minutes
What I started to notice was that despite his lack of ball speed, my son is only about 10-30 pins behind me per game of power bowl (I usually score about 400-450, he scores 400-430). Very occasionally he beats me.
After watching, I see that it's because if you start your ball going (regardless of speed) it keeps going that direction. No friction loss, no curving of the lane.
After realizing this, I realized that if I basically just threw the ball as hard as I could, I could actually lift pins into the air. In power bowl mode, I basically now just try to get as many pins to ricochet around as possible, in hopes of knocking everything down. Plus, this maximizes blogging/surfing time.
Now, my son has tired of bowling and wants to play Wii baseball, which takes the same amount of time for both of us, so....
I'm out.
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