Coronvirus update 4/9: Switch Boxing

So, it's been awhile since the last post and I thought I might as well do an update.

By now most places of work in Virginia have voluntarily shutdown or done work from home where possible.  Our household is fortunate to be in the work from home camp; we don't seem to be in the same immediate danger that so many other Americans are in.  So, count our blessings I guess.

One of our first world problems though is the closure of gyms.  Not a huge problem, I essentially only go to our apartment complex's gym to use the heavy bag, but it's starting to wear.

So, I ordered Fitness Boxing on the Nintendo Switch.  

It is...okay.  It's basically taebo, for those of us who remember Taebo.  You use the two joycons to move your hands.  You have free workouts and daily workouts.  The daily workout is based upon your history, weight, etc.

It'll make you sweat, which is better than just sitting and doing nothing.  The problem is, just like with Wii Sports of yore, if you really wanted to you could sit and do nothing.  The feedback seems to be based on how hard you can jerk the joycon. 

Certain aspects are immensely frustrating, I gave up on trying full body ducks/sways and now just jerk the joycons in that direction when it comes up on the feed.  The process does not reward moving your whole body; you keep on missing it if you try said full body ducking.

Is it worth it?  Well, I basically measure video games the same way I measure movies.  If I end up putting the same number of hours into a video game that I would have in going to the movie theater, it's a good deal, and I've hit it.  Do I think I'll continue to do this daily once the gym opens up again?

No, I don't.  This has been useful for exercise other than rucking around the wilds of suburban Northern Virginia, but that's pretty much it.  Glad I got it, well past the "hours spent" cost, but this seems like only a little above shovelware, especially given the price.  This should have been part of a Wii Sports-like bundle.

Refurbished Treasures: NES and SNES classic unboxings.

I missed it when the NES and SNES Classics, small ROM-boxes produced by Nintendo of their Famicom-platformed consoles, hit the market a few years back.  With a limited run, the systems are difficult to find new-in-box, and for most you have to scour eBay or similar websites.

Well as it turns out Nintendo of America sells refurbs on their website.  I have heard excellent things about their refurbished products, and going into some sort of nostalgia stage I decided to go ahead and order them.  I chose the cheapest shipping option and the arrived from Redmond after about 2 weeks.

The box came with anti-tamper tape

The shipping box came with anti-tamper tape, and had two smaller boxes inside-one for each system.  They were well backed with individual wrapping for all the components.  You'll note that the boxes themselves are just cardboard with stickers on them; you won't find retail packaging with these.

The first thing I noticed after opening the packages is that the consoles themselves are small.  I had known that they were going to be mini-sized, but the included controllers are about the width of the consoles.  My tiny, gnome-like hands hold them just fine.

The NES only comes with one controller.  This is perhaps not as unreasonable as it sounds; the majority of NES games, when they were two player, tended to be sequentially rather than concurrently.  In addition I was surprised to see that the port was not the original controller ports.  For some reason I had thought that they were going to be, even at the point where I was scouring the Internet for a NES Advantage.  The cables are stupid short, something that I hadn't noticed back when I was in middle school and this was in a TV in my bedroom.  Picking up controller for the first time in going on 30 years was shocking; the controller was tiny compared to modern consoles which seem to have older gamer sensibilities in mind.

The SNES uses the same ports as the NES, although those are hidden behind actual faux-SNES controller ports.  I'll be sure to see if I can use a SNES controller on the NES.  Again, the cables are short but the controller feels a lot better.  Could be because I  played it in high school more, and muscle memory is more forgiving.  As with the NES controller, the build quality was high.  These replicate an early SNES controller without the engraved top.

Looking over the consoles and controllers, the quality is astonishing.  It seems as if the Internet Stories about the quality of Nintendo refurbed products are true, if I didn't know they came returned I wouldn't have known they were pre-owned.  I searched for blemishes and scratches and couldn't find any, and the build quality was very high.  I'm a little reminded of Internet Stories were someone orders a blemished firearm from someone like Palmetto and they can't find any visible blemishes.

So far I have to give a big thumbs up to Nintendo of America for their work at their refurbishment center.  I realize it could be that these were returned un-opened, but I gotta wonder if NOA wouldn't have sold them as new if it were the case.