By John Cooper
Jul 12, 2010
The good folks at JumpStart recently sent me their newest game JumpStart Get Moving: Family Fitness. The game has been rated E for Everyone (with Comic Mischief) by the ESRB and hit store shelves on June 15th with an MSRP of $29.99. If you're not familiar with them, Jumpstart is an award-winning adventure-based 3D virtual world that is super-personalized, wildly imaginative and really fun, but don't let that fool you - it also teaches math, reading, and critical thinking skills so kids get a real jump start in life. (disclosure: that's from the Jumpstart website).
Jumpstart teamed with Brooke Burke of "Dancing with the Stars" fame and two human movement experts to create this new sports game for the Nintendo Wii, targeted for use by the entire family. JumpStart Get Moving: Family Fitness has some great and fun sports games: football, baseball, basketball, balancing games, volleyball, speed skating and more...18 games in all...each requiring the use of the Wii remote, Balance Board and/or nun chucks and each with a choice of three difficulty levels.
Now I have to confess that I do not own a Wii console, so I asked my good friends Anthony and Laura and their 5 year old daughter Lily to give the game a try. They are avid Wii users with an extensive collection of Wii games. Here's what they reported back to me...
"As soon as we put the JumpStart Get Moving: Family Fitness disc in Lily was fascinated by the graphics. There are almost a dozen backgrounds to choose from and each of them is vividly portrayed. Lily picked out all of the attributes for her "Jumpee" (the Jumpstart avatar)...hair, eyes, smile, clothing, body color and shoes...as well as her colors. Green and orange go surprisingly well together.
"It's very cool that two kids can play at one time, so when Lily has her friend Taylor over for a play date they can both be playing without any of the downtime that they each find so frustrating with other games. We used the "Easy" level and it seemed as though Lily was able to pick up on the needed movements fairly quickly. Some of the required body movements ended up being a bit too difficult for her at first but all in all she thoroughly enjoyed the games, as did mom and dad."
So, it would seem that I need to head out and purchase a Wii console so I can get my own daughters playing JumpStart Get Moving: Family Fitness. Hey, all of our kids could certainly use more exercise than they get on a normal basis. I know I definitely could, too! From what my friends Anthony and Laura have to say, it sounds as though JumpStart Get Moving: Family Fitness is one way to make it fun for the whole family.
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