Friday 12 April 2013

Xbox 360 Fun: Excercise Bike Meets PGR4

Oooodear, it's been nearly a year since my last post. I will remedy this with this bloggery o' shite.

<-- This is a Reebok Cyberfit. It's a clever old PS2/Xbox peripheral that goes nicely with a driving game or three -- what you do is pop it on your excercise bike, connect it up to your old PS2/Xbox, put on your driving game of choice (PGR2)  and pedal away. It uses a magnetic sensor (and wires, and all that stuff) to convert your furious pedalling into in-game acceleration and, there you go, you're pedalling round the Nurburging. Much better than a spinning class.

I had one, and it was awesome, but it got brokened. The magnetic sensor thingy got crushed and it was sad, but it didn't work with the 360 anyway so I needed a quick rubbish work-around as sitting there, pedalling on a bike whilst reading Twitter is pretty boring.

INSTRUCTIONS
  • Put excercise bike near to TV/monitor/display device.
  • Tape an old controller to handlebars of your bike. Adjust for comfort -- you'll only really need the left thumbstick. I only had shit Staples sellotape and insulating tape to hand but it did the job.
  • Put driving game in console of your choice. I used PGR4 because the NPCs cheer me on and wave flags and all that shiznit. The tracks are also pretty, lots to look at.
  • Go into the game options and set the transmission to manual. Turn the car sounds off as well.
  • Go into a time trial mode. Select the slowest car you can find and pick your desired track.
  • Get more tape and tape down the acccelerate button on the controller.
  • Now just start the game and, errr, pedal. Be gentle for about five minutes to warm up.
  • Keep the car in first gear to maintain a nippy bike speed of around 25mph, fiddle about with tape holding down acceleration button if neccessary.
  • Once you've warmed up nicely, play about with the gears on your bike as you get to hills and flats.
  • Pedal like a bastard, then fall off and curl up into a sweaty foetal position as your knees want to explode after all that because you worked HARD, didn't you. Yes.
It is a bit of rubbish work-around TBH, but it does seem to pretty much do the same thing on screen that the Cyberfit did on the Xbox. I still unconciously stop pedalling around corners and get a bit yay when I reach the finish line, so it's effective enough to cunningly fool my silly subconcious into thinking that it's actually a bit real, and it's better than reading Twitter.