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Play Wii Fit With Japanese Maids
Posted by Brian Ashcraft at 5:00 PM on October 1, 2008
You know what's missing with Wii Fit? Nope. It's maids! That's right, maids. Over in Akihabara's Refresh Club, folks can play Wii Fit with maids in frilly dresses. Like most things, Wii Fit maid style comes at a price: 30 minutes will run you ¥2,600. Says the establishment's owner:
Playing Wii Fit by yourself is lonely. But here, playing along with a maid makes exercising enjoyable.
That's a good point, and we're now slightly shocked Nintendo didn't bundle the game with maids. If Wii Fit is not your thing, Refresh Club runs other services like ear cleaning, foot massages and yoga — make that, maid yoga.
Refresh Club [Candy Fruit via Akiba Keizai via alafista]
Oh Dan "Shoe" Hsu, what dark secrets of the video game press won't you expose? In the latest episode of Behind the Scenes: Gaming Journalism, a report on all the things the gaming press does and has done to them appearing on his and Crispin Boyer's website Sore Thumbs, Shoe explores the seedy world of free baseball games and Japanese escorts.
While I knew that 99.99% of women would rather play video games than sleep with me, the results of a poll conducted by women's website PoshMama.com for E for All discovered that many of them would rather play games than sleep period. The website polled 120 women, and then dug some interesting statistics out of the 71% of women who tested gaming-positive. For instance, many of the women admitted to playing video games when they should be doing more important things, such as sleeping (more than 33%), on the phone (32%), or while at work (20%). A whopping 53% admitted that gaming had made them late for family and social gatherings. 
No. Before you start, no. Whatever it was you were thinking, or were going to ask, no. It's not here. She's not here. Instead, Gamasutra's list of the top 20 women in gaming focuses on those with the biggest impact on the medium today, whether as developers, executives or even writers. The list is unranked (ie it doesn't count down from 20 to 1), and while it contains some pleasant surprises (Valve's Kim Swift, for example), there's sadly no room for my favourite, Zoë Mode. I don't care that she's not a real woman. She's still my favourite.
A new Next-Gen Screen Digest piece takes a peek back into console market war history to see how Nintendo seems to have won out in the quest for that most elusive of goals: bringing a broader audience of women and girls into the gaming fold. 
You might need to head to Australia to find them (Brian? Luke?). Or at least, that's where the sure bet is. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend cites figures showing 41 percent of gamers in Australia are women, and also 38 percent in the United States, both figures representing growth. The Herald also says that if the trend continues, it will be 1:1 guys/girls gaming by 2014.
Do Playboy models love video games? On a first meeting with Jo Garcia, it'd be easy to levy scepticism. She's Playboy's "Cyber Girl Of The Year," beating out 52 weeks of rival models in an online-only competition. It just happens, Garcia said, that she's "really big into games."
More data! CNN points out that according to the Entertainment Software Association, 38 percent of gamers are females and spend an average of 7.4 hours a week playing video games. What's more, they spend the rest of their time, doing other things. Not surprised! Sony Computer Entertainment's Torrie Dorrell points out:
