Well, I am a decent Brawl player. Not a world-class expert, but I know what I’m doing and can hold my own even with characters not held in high regard for tournament play. So I got the jOG set up and began a 1-on-1 match. Suffice to say, having to run in place while also thinking about precise spacing, attack strings, and defense was not easy. Especially since if I stopped running for even a moment, my character would just freeze in place. I missed a few recoveries this way, and almost whiffed a few throws because I forgot to run simply to do a throw. I won, but only barely and it was partially because my opponent picked a character he doesn’t really know how to play. Here are some of his comments about my performance afterward:

“It was really obvious that you were using something that made it more difficult to play, because you were all over the place.”

“You died more than once using the wrong move as a result.”

My own comments were basically a string of profanities, and won’t be reprinted here.

He praised me for being quick to compensate for the handicap the jOG was imposing on me, but we both agreed; I wasn’t playing all that well, and the jOG was to blame. So I moved on to Mario Kart Wii and we went at it for a few laps. He beat me there, partially due to my lack of practice, and partially due to momentarily forgetting to run in place to make certain turns; I ended up falling off the course a few times and he got way ahead. All I had to show for it was some fatigue and looking like a loser. At this point I thanked him for his time and decided to try a few other games.

I had similar results all around. No More Heroes and Resident Evil 4 were quite a bit clumsier to play because I had to focus on constantly moving. This doesn’t mean I’m uncoordinated; I can handle using all four limbs for different tasks at once. But when I can normally do something with X amount of effort, and a controller add-on adds more effort to that without any benefit to my gameplay, that’s a pretty stupid design idea. This is my major problem with the jOG. It does not actually enhance any Wii games, but rather makes them harder to control. It offers no special health benefit that buying a regular pedometer wouldn’t provide, and it requires adding another cord to the Wiimote setup.