There's a French company called BigBen Interactive that's looking to cash in on the Wii exergaming craze while it lasts. One of their offers, My Body Coach, is a pretty standard Wii Fit-alike that comes with one-pound weights as a pack-in. Reasonable enough.

It's the other project, Cyberbike, that is absolutely demented. Cyberbike's exercise pack-in is going to be a full-size exercise bike. Seriously, that thing in the pic? Comes with the game. Somehow.

Cyberbike looks like it's being pitched as a sort of biking sim hybrid. BigBen's press release touts 18 circuits to traverse and lots of customization items to unlock for your bike and biker. The game will feature a multiplayer mode where people take turns on the Wii-connected exercise bike and a story mode that is clearly going to break new ground in the field of interactive entertainment. 

Now, you're probably wondering, "How the hell expensive is a game packed in with an exercise bike going to be?" You're not alone. Unfortunately, BigBen hasn't announced a price yet for the Cyberbike set. Unless they're going to make their product substantially more expensive than Wii Fit, it seems unlikely that the pack-in bike is going to be a very good one. The pics already released of it sure don't look promising, anyway. 

Cyberbike (9 images)

Hot exerbiking action comes to Wii!!

Nostalgia's a funny thing. Altered Beast was the Genesis's pack-in game, and its minimalist opening - "Rise from your grave!" - has achieved a sort of memetic half-life. It's reasonably popular among Sega fans, or so I'm told, which may explain the inflated price that's been stuck on the thing.

Nostalgia has played you wrong. This is not merely an old classic that has aged poorly, or which suffers by comparison with later titles, as is the case with so many Virtual Console games.

Altered Beast is, in fact, forged from pure bullshit, and to play it is to know sheer hatred. I am operating on the theory that you are not a hero, called back into duty by Zeus to pursue an epic quest. In fact, you are a damned soul, forced by the weight of your past sins to go up against armies of demons and nightmares with nothing more than your fists. You will die. You will die many times, helpless to prevent it, and the moments when you have the power to compete on a level playing field - when you are able to get three orbs and transform into a new, more powerful animal form - are fleeting.

You will be knocked down pits; you will suffer from the game being essentially unplayable on a standard Wiimote, with only two face buttons in a comfortably accessible place; you will slap the B button like an unpaid pimp, adding credit after credit to your account as the game does its best to extort every last fictional quarter it can. Altered Beast is trying to mug you for your pocket change. It is a postmodern, electronic, occasionally startlingly homoerotic myth of Sisyphus, and I could no more recommend it as a recreational activity than I would getting a brick shot to the chops.

Related Articles on GamePro

Whenever people say that video games are a waste of time, I inevitably find myself thinking about stuff like the Mario AI Competition. The goal of the competition is simple: design an AI using one of many different methods that can successfully play through segments of Marks Persson's open source Java-based Infinite Mario Bros, a clone that generates infinite randomized Mario levels that grow progressively more difficult over time. Since there's no way for the program to anticipate level designs, it'll have to make decisions in an intelligent fashion.

The video you see above displays the winning program from the Mario AI Competition in action, playing through a randomly-generated Mario sequence that would probably kill most human players instantly. The program was written by Robin Baumgarten using the A* algorithm to help the program make decisions about which of many possible decisions it should make regarding how Mario should behave. The result is an AI that could probably complete any extant Mario game with ease, possibly better than many human players.

Related Articles on GamePro

Scribblenauts is due to be one of the big game releases for this week, but somehow a copy leaked earlier this weekend. One enterprising hacker got hold of the ROM and ripped out the full list of words it recognized... and it's [i]long[/i], to the tune of 22,802 words. You can browse a full list here, but beware spoilers (and some rough language from the uploader).

This list by itself could prove that Scribblenauts is going to be one of the year's must-buys. Here's just a very small sample of the frankly insane terms you can still enter into the game in order to create objects that help you solve a wide and crazy variety of puzzles.

  • Chicken Nugget
  • Dyoplosaurus
  • Encephalographer
  • Flugelhorn
  • Jump Rope
  • Miniature Bull Terrier
  • Nutritionist
  • Parachute Pants
  • Registered Nurse

I'm betting a lot of you reading this are too young to remember the heyday of the arcade game developer Data East. They did some NES ports here and there, but by far their most memorable games were their quarter-munchers. If the ESRB is to be believed (and it usually is), there's a collection of Data East games heading to Wii soon, courtesy Majesco.

Retro compilations are usually not so noteworthy, but the ESRB description for the game makes it clear that Data East Collection is going to be special. On top of all time kitschy favorites like Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja, Burger Time, Caveman Ninja (a.k.a. Joe & Mac), Street Slam, and Secret Agent, the collection includes at least one import-only lost treasure.

ESRB confirms that a port of the incredibly fun puzzle game Magical Drop III is going to be included in the collection. Previously this game has only been availble for PC through GameTap, but it's best played head-to-head in your living room with a friend, virulently cursing at each other all the while. There's no word yet on when the Data East Collection ships, but Majesco has yet to officially state that the game really exists. I'm sure it won't be too long before they do, though. 

Wii screens on GamePro.com

More articles about Wii

In North America, the Sega Master System had almost no real market share to speak of. It was a big deal in the UK and Europe, but Nintendo just blew Sega out of the water here.

There was always one game that got people a little curious about that other system, though, and that was Phantasy Star. Whenever you picked up a magazine that wasn't Nintendo Power, there were usually a few lines about it; I remember Game Players' Guide running many letters concerning how to find the hovercraft or how not to get petrified. I knew a lot of guys who rented a Master System back in the day just to check this game out, to see how it stacked up to Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy.

Time hasn't been kind to either Phantasy Star or its series, sadly. The first game is a very 8-bit RPG, complete with an unstated expectation that you will grind your face off. (I have a pet theory that so many people about my age are so prone to constant multitasking because of grindy PC and console games. You had to be watching TV or listening to the radio or something while you circled Corneria killing imps for four hours because otherwise, you would go utterly mad.)

Phantasy Star's big innovations within the genre are some of the earliest RPG cutscenes, the first-person dungeon crawls, its weird science-fantasy setting (wizards riding around in hovercrafts; magic-wielding warriors hacking robots apart with swords), and being one of the first games in general to feature a female protagonist. Alis Lansdale has about as much personality as anyone else does in an eight-bit game, but this is a point in time when Samus Aran suddenly being female caused a medium-wide seismic event.

The game's focus on grinding is most of what makes it hard to play now, after grinding was all but absent in the sixteen and thirty-two bit console generations. (Of course, then it made a big comeback on the PS2, because... I don't know, somebody lost a bet.) Phantasy Star is still an important game, though, especially if you're like me and spent your adolesence wondering about this strange and foreign game for that system nobody had. If you bought Phantasy Star IV last year, you can play the original and get a lot of cameos and references from PSIV that were previously indecipherable.

Related Articles on GamePro

Did you play Tetris when you were little? If so, you've probably got more brain than folks who didn't!

Results of a new study about to be released by the Mind Research Network later this week reveal that playing Tetris regularly not only causes parts of the brain to grow stronger, but it can actually cause a person's total amount of cortex to increase. The findings came from performing CAT scans on a test group of adolescent Tetris-players and a control group of non-players the same age. By the end of the three month test period, the Tetris-players had bigger and better-functioning brains! 

The scientists chalk this up to how a “challenging visuospatial task” can enhance brain function and even alter its structure. Dr. Richard Haier, one of the study's authors, thinks in the future Tetris might be linked to "lasting effects that generalize to other activity." It's even being speculated that regular Tetris play might help people fight off the mental declines that occur as part of the aging process.

So even you old folks reading this-- go play Tetris! You've got no excuses anymore! 

Tetris Party screens on GamePro.com

PlayOn is a company that basically sells relatively cheap ($39.99) technology that lets folks use their PC as a media server for purposes of streaming content to their television sets. Some versions of the PlayOn launcher let you tether the signal to one of your video game consoles, essentially turning it into a set-top box through its browser. Today PlayOn announced the release of a beta version of its streaming software for Wii and you may find it's worth your time and money.

All the PlayOn software requires is that you have a PC in the house on, have your Wii pointed at http://www.playon.tv through the Internet channel, and a connection that'll support at least 1.5 to 2.0 Mbps. Download the PlayOn software, make sure you have WMP 11 installed for... some reason, and then start streaming away. Right now you can easily access a very Wii Remote-friendly YouTube interview, Hulu, the CBS library, CNN, ESPN, Netflix streams, and more through the PlayOn open architecture widget.

My home connection meets the PlayOn requirements and I found my streams smooth and pleasant to watch. On my HDTV there was some slight pixelization of picture even on content marked HD, since most web content now only goes up to 720p. There would be occasional moments where you could really tell it was a stream, like slowdown or stuttering, but these moments were brief even during streams of hour-long shows like Star Trek. There were no issues with timeouts, videos not loading, or videos displaying incorrectly.

You can try the PlayOn launcher for free for 14 days before deciding whether or not to drop some money on a full license for the software. If you do, you can use the same license to stream media through your PS3, Xbox 360, or a host of other devices. I actually have to consider this a really good value, especially when you consider how many households have Wiis but not other systems yet. Give it a try, play with it, and see if you think it's worth your time. I'm not sure if I'll be using it enough to warrant buying the software license yet, but the thought has certainly crossed my mind.

Wii screens on GamePro.com

More articles about Wii

If I was the kind of person who hosted Photoshop contests, I'd be hosting one right now.

Silicon Era's been paying attention to the patent applications coming out of Nintendo recently, which led to the recent stories concerning a horseback-riding controller. (Official word from Majesco on that one: "Majesco does not comment on rumors.") Now they've happened across a patent application from Howard Cheng, VP of R&D at NoA, QED, ASAP, concerning a soft and nerflike football controller.

Thankfully, you don't actually throw the thing. Instead, you stick your Wiimote in it and carry it like a football, allowing the built-in sensors to detect your movement. The result: immersive football gaming fun.

Also, propelling nerf footballs through your television screen.

But mostly the fun.

Related Articles on GamePro

Arad Senki is not a good anime. (In fact, it's really pretty terrible.) Its ending sequence, though, is one of the most delightful things I've seen in weeks.

Arad Senki is based on the Korean side-scrolling beat 'em up MMORPG known in the US as Dungeon Fighter Online. That game doesn't look or play much like the single-player old-school RPGs being homaged here, but... you know, if there's ever a console spin-off that looks like the video above? I'd play it.