Wii-athlon

At this point in my life, if I were to invest in a video game system, it would have to be the Nintendo Wii. There's something about the simplicity of the Wii that resonates with me, just like there is something about about the complexity of Playstation 3 and XBox that numbs my hands in a rather arthritic position. If fact, at the end of any "realistic" game, I find myself not only at the bottom of the scoring bracket, but also nursing a migraine and applying eye drops because I HAVE NOT blinked in 30 minutes. It's just not for me. The Wii allows a simple-minded person such as myself to be competitive in a game by just swinging my arm back and forth as fast as possible, which is about as complex a motion as I can handle without needing to pop an Adderall.

So when I see that our friends at RTL Interactive have been making a biathlon Wii game, I start to get a little excited (the first twinkle that caught my eye was the re-release Goldeneye, which is the only "complicated" game I've ever been good at).

I have been told that biathlon is the biggest winter sport in Europe, which is something hard for an American like me to understand. Don't get me wrong, I like biathlon more than about 99% of Americans, but that's because I am part of the 1% who has actually heard of it, not to mention part of the 0.0001% who has tried it.

My only worry is that the game play will over-simplify the dynamic process of biathlon. There are so many subtleties that can be missed by the average bystander, and these details are what make the sport so enjoyable to watch. For this reason, I have outlined commandments that should be included in any biathlon (or nordic) skiing game:

1) In the intro, when all the teams show up in their tricked out private buses and wax vans, the US must show up in 4 mid-sized rentals from the airport, with a wax-bench strapped to the roof.

2) You can pay extra "ski dollars" to prep in the Austrian wax tent before the race. Your hematacrit gets +10, but your "trophy room" is erased.

3) Playing as a Norwegian, you can enter the secret code which causes Ole Einar Bjorndalen to mutter an ancient Norwegian prayer. This causes the Scandanavian God Ullr to materialize from the snowbank and strike down the closest Swedish skier.

4) Playing as an American, a secret code will give you the antidote to the death-flu-virus that you invariably picked up at the airport. Another code will let you cough on the skier who is shooting adjacent to you, spreading that same illness.

5) The possibility to upgrade your "measly .22" for a real man's weapon: a grenade launcher.

6) If the going get's tough, the tough get gangster: press and hold L and R for 2 seconds to switch to "gangster  mode", which lets your character pull a Glock from the back of his spandex and shoot wildly (and sideways) at the targets, missing them all. This also gives your ski technique a slight limp in the left side.

7) Training mode, in which the athlete trains for 600-1000 mind-numbing, thumb-blisteringly boring hours per year for about 5 years before being able to ski in his/her first race.