Do you want to know how to make yourself feel old?

Fire up Rock Band 2 on your PS3, hit the network for an On-line Tour and find yourself some bandmates. Last night, my band found itself performing with a singer in Massachusetts and a bass player in Washington.

After a while, we enquired about one another’s age; and so it was revealed that the singer of my band was just 11 years old, and the bass player an impressive 15.

At 3 in the morning, you suddenly feel quite old when you realise you’re playing a plastic guitar in a virtual band with a singer whose voice hasn’t even broken yet. That kid’s barely a quarter of my age and only seven years older than Eloïse.

At the same time, this illustrates how unbelievably cool, powerful and social the Internet is.

Guitar Hero World Tour is finally out of our PS3, but usurped only by another guitar game, namely Rock Band 2.

A lot of people prefer the Rock Band games to the Guitar Hero ones, but after a week or so of playing Rock Band 2, I have to say that they’re very similar in quality.

For example, Guitar Hero WT has better song-playing statistics at the end of each song. It also displays song high scores per difficulty level and clearly indicates songs that have been played perfectly, using gold stars. Rock Band 2, on the other hand, notes only the highest score attained for a song at any difficulty level and doesn’t indicate which songs have been played perfectly.

Guitar Hero WT is also harder than Rock Band 2 at any given skill level. Where the two titles have an overlapping track listing, those songs are easier to play at, say, medium difficulty in Rock Band 2 than in Guitar Hero WT.

Guitar Hero WT also looks better than Rock Band 2. The characters have more detail and the player has even greater control over the design and clothing of his character. Rock Band 2 is by no means bad in either area, but Guitar Hero WT is definitely its superior here.

Where Rock Band 2 scores better is in the area of downloadable content, or DLC as it’s commonly known. Simply put, there’s a lot more of it, and it’s even possible to import songs from the original Rock Band title into Rock Band 2.

To do this, one simply installs the latest Rock Band patch, which adds the export feature to the game. Then, one visits the on-line PlayStation Store to purchase an export key for €3, the proceeds from which are licence fees due for the use of the songs in the game’s sequel.

With the export key purchased, you export the songs and then simply slip the Rock Band 2 disc back in the drive. Almost all of the songs from Rock Band are now available in Rock Band 2.

The actual game play is quite similar in both titles, with just a few conspicuous differences. For example, Rock Band 2 allows freestyle guitar playing at the end of some songs, similar to the drum fills allowed in Guitar Hero WT. The addition of this feature for the guitar is a welcome bonus.

Career mode from Guitar Hero WT is known as Tour mode in Rock Band 2. It’s similar in idea, but the execution is slightly different, in that there are single song sets and mystery set lists, where the songs are basically chosen at random. It’s also impossible to change the difficulty level halfway through a set in Rock Band 2, which can lead to the unpleasant discovery that one is unable to finish a multi-song set at the current level. This results in having to abandon the gig, resulting in the forfeiture of a few thousand fans.

That brings me to another difference. One plays just for money in Guitar Hero WT, but one plays for money and fans in Rock Band 2. The notion of playing gigs in different venues, cities and countries has also been enhanced by the ability to unlock vans and planes, which carry one away from one’s home town to other cities, then countries and eventually continents. On the way, one can hire staff, such as managers and promoters, although it’s unclear to me what effect these actually have on the game.

There are many other differences, such as in the on-line play against remote players, but in the final analysis, I consider both games pretty much equal in terms of the gaming experience that they offer. It’s even hard to pick a winner as far as the track list is concerned, because many tracks that are fun to play aren’t ones you would necessarily choose to listen to.

Eloïse seems to prefer Guitar Hero WT, though, as she’s forever telling me to play “Ozzybourne”, necessitating a change of disc in order to keep her happy. It’s a shame the songs aren’t interchangeable between games, but as I mentioned above, Guitar Hero WT can’t even play the songs from earlier games in the GH series.

So, my Guitar Hero WT ranking has pretty much stalled while I now plough my way through the tour mode of Rock Band 2. It remains to be seen whether I will then find myself coming back to one title more than the other. In the end, the tiebreaker may just turn out to be the track listing.

Our Wii Fit congratulated me today on five weeks of uninterrupted daily use. It could have been longer, but our holiday in Tenerife threw a spanner in the works.

With nearly forty hours of time racked up on the balance board, I still have a lot of fun working out on the Wii Fit. A couple of other titles, bought at the same time as our Wii, are still sitting on the shelf in their cellophane. That says enough, I think. The Wii Fit disc resides on a near-permanent basis in the Wii’s slot.

Although I can’t claim to have lost much weight by playing them, the balance games are still my favourite. I have achieved four star scores at all except Zazen, Ski Jump and Snowboard Slalom, at which I’m still pretty average. Football Heading, Ski Slalom, Table Tilt, Tightrope Tension, Balance Bubble and Penguin Slide, on the other hand, are much more my cup of tea.

Of those that offer advanced play modes, I have achieved four star scores there, too, except for Ski Slalom, at which I’ve so far only managed three stars in the more difficult setting. Heading, on the other hand, boasts a top ten score chart containing nothing but my perfect (655) scores. It took me quite a while to work up to that and I got plenty of criticism from Sarah for spending too much time on it.

Next favourite are the aerobics, of which the Super Hula Hoop, Rhythm Boxing and Step Plus are my activities of choice. I frequently also do the Jogging, although I enjoy it much less (and we have the much superior cross-trainer, if I really want a decent running session).

Getting four stars at the boxing is tough and I’ve only managed it once, even in basic mode. In advanced mode, I can’t even remember the moves it tells me to do, so it’s a bit of a non-starter, really.

I was useless at the Step games when I started, but am much improved now. I’ve managed to get within a couple of points of the maximum score, but a perfect routine still eludes me. Of course, it’s ultimately not about the score one achieves, but the exercise itself.

Less appealing to me are the muscle and yoga routines. Some of them are very hard for one who’s not very limber. Others are just really knackering; which is the point, I know, but since my main goal is to lose weight, I’m better off with a longer aerobics session. I’m lucky if I can score two stars on most of the yoga and muscle activities.

It has to be taken with a pinch of salt, but my Wii Fit age is usually a good few years younger than my actual age when I take my daily body test. Once or twice, it even told me I had the body of someone in their late twenties, although I’m sure it must have been a very fat young man, whoever it had in mind.

All in all, the Wii Fit is a terrific piece of software and very reasonably priced, when you consider that it’s supplied with the balance board. The Wii Fit was virtually unobtainable in most of Europe until a couple of months ago. Every time a few units came in, they were sold within minutes, so we had to be very patient before we finally managed to get hold of one. Nintendo has quite a hit on its hands.

Sarah, on the other hand, doesn’t like the balance games and prefers the yoga and muscle exercises. As you might imagine, she’s also a lot better at them than I am. Where our tastes meet is with the aerobic activities, which we both like to do.

The Wii Fit has garnered some criticism in certain quarters as not being a serious tool for anyone trying to get fit. It’s also said that almost no-one still uses it after the first month.

In the case of our family, that’s clearly not the case. Sarah and I still use it daily and enjoy doing so. Even Eloïse manages at least a body test on most days. If used with discipline on a daily basis, it can absolutely lead towards becoming fitter. As for those who don’t stick with it, you can’t blame the product for that. You may as well write off every diet that’s ever been devised, too, because there will always be people who abandon those after a few weeks, too.

If I have any criticism of the product at all, it’s that you can’t skip certain text screens when logging in for a new session. Some of the dialogue gets very repetitive when you use the system on a daily basis. It’s a minor quibble, though, with an otherwise excellent product.

Speaking of Guitar Hero World Tour, I’ve now scored 100% on quite a few songs at medium difficulty. Most songs I can play at 90% or better, with many at higher than 95%. I completed career mode some time ago and am currently at the 14th rank.

You’d think that would mean that I should be playing at the hard level, but I still get booed off stage on most songs, because too many difficult new elements are introduced. I need to play in practice mode, I suppose. Nevertheless, when I play against people on-line, more often than not, I emerge victorious.

This game just never seems to lose its appeal. Nevertheless, I took a moment to make my first PlayStation Store purchase a few days ago: Lumines Supernova.

When deciding late last year which video game console to buy, I chose the PS3 because the next instalment of Lumines was going to be coming out on that system. Incidentally, several years ago, I also bought a PSP (PlayStation Portable) just to be able to play Lumines and I scarcely played another game on that system until Lumines II made its debut. As you might suspect, since that day, Lumines II has permanently occupied the cartridge slot of my PSP.

Lumines Supernova hit the Playstation Store in the US just before Christmas, but we Europeans have had to wait just over a month for it to become downloadable over here.

I haven’t explored the game’s new modes. In fact, I’ve played the normal single player game only once, but I can tell you that it looks and sounds great on a 65″ screen with a good audio system. It feels a bit odd to play it with a PS3 controller, but that’s because I’m so used to the PSP. I daresay I’ll get used to it.

Now, if someone could find a way to combine Lumines with Guitar Hero…

We’ve succumbed and thrown in our lot with the plebs. Yes, we’ve purchased a Nintendo Wii; and yes, we purchased it primarily so that we could use the ubiquitous, yet paradoxically scarce Wii Fit.

Not exactly hidden, but, shall we say, slightly opaque costs before we got started were an extra remote-control, an extra Nunchuk, a set of component leads (for better quality video) and a LAN adapter (for on-line gaming without the high latency of a wireless hop).

With that little lot in place, we were ready to rumble.

The Wii, whose remote-control is fitted with motion and velocity sensors, really does present an altogether more physically consuming video game experience. In that regard, it represents a quantum leap forward in video game technology, placing it on a entirely new evolutionary track. In the world of video games, the Wii is a genetic mutation, a fish that has crawled onto land.

Of course, pioneering new technology has its pitfalls, and there are moments when the control is not precise or sensitive enough for the complex motion used in some simulations. The Wii, as revolutionary as it is, does have moments when it feels like the prototype of a new class of video gaming experience; and that’s essentially what it is. That it doesn’t feel like that more of time time is a testament to the great work of Nintendo’s engineers.

So, whilst the Wii has intensified the interaction between man and machine, its most important contribution is arguably to pave the way for the next generation of this type of console, which is likely to bring many refinements. In the interim, perhaps we’ll see a second generation of remote-control for the Wii.

Nintendo were so focused on delivering an entirely new kind of physical experience, that the actual graphics and sound have become secondary to the controls. Here, it’s all about how you play and not how it looks or sounds.

If one wants blazing HD graphics, the Wii is not the console to buy. By today’s standards, its output is low resolution and the standard kit contains only composite cables, so the picture quality isn’t the best, either. For the best results, you need a set of component leads.

The best native resolution you’ll get from the console in the PAL world is 480p from a progressive scan display. Plugged into our AV receiver, that’s upscaled to 1080p, which looks good, but certainly wouldn’t win any awards for realism.

If you want the pinnacle of old-style video gaming technology, you’re still going to want a PlayStation 3. It and the Wii are so different that justifying owning both is easy. Indeed, with a game like Guitar Hero, the PS3 is on even footing with the Wii, when it comes to an all-consuming tactile experience. On the other hand, Guitar Hero is available for the Wii, too.

I called the Wii a rod for my own back in the title of this entry, because of the aforementioned Wii Fit and Konami’s arcade favourite, Dancing Stage Hottest Party. I’ve played games before that left my heart racing and beads of sweat on my forehead, but no game has ever left muscles over my whole body feeling stretched.

In fact, it’s hard to call the Wii Fit a game in the traditional sense. What Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training is to mental agility training on the Nintendo DS, the Wii Fit is to the physical. The games even have a similar structure, calling upon the user to choose a few exercises each day, before undergoing a handful of randomly chosen tests to determine one’s virtual brain or bodily age.

For us and many like us, the Wii is a strange mix of relaxation and exertion. Sarah really likes it and has taken to the Wii Fit’s daily training regimen. Even Eloïse has started to play it.

There’s really only one area where the Wii falls flat on its face and that’s with regard to memory. It comes with only 512 Kb of internal storage, which is going to fill up quite fast. To alleviate that problem, it has an SD slot, but it’s incompatible with SDHC cards. That effectively limits one to memory cards of 2 Gb or less, which is lame beyond reproach.

You’re also going to consume a lot of AA batteries, which is what the remote-controls use. You can use NiMH rechargeables, of course, or custom battery packs and a charging station. We opted for the latter.