Apparently the Wii can let you bowl, bond with your family, and now teach you karate. Yes, that’s right, this ancient art is coming to the Wii and it’ll supposedly teach you the fine art of martial arts. It’s called Ninja Reflex, and Electronic Arts hopes to teach martial arts visually through the Wii console. EA announced that Ninja Reflex should be coming to retail stores after March 4, so people won’t have to wait too long to test out their ninja skills ‘Wiisually’.

How Ninja Reflex works is that it offers a series of ninja challenges to test your true inner ninja by testing reflexes, hand and eye coordination, and reaction times. A sensei — the typical Asian teacher with a long white beard — guides you as he tests how truly skilled you are. As you practice your ninja skills, you’ll advance by belts, just like in Tae Kwon Do. You can go from a white belt to a black belt, depending on how masterful you are with their challenges. It might seem silly, even juvenile to an extent, but experts of martial arts are backing this up, including Tae Kwon Do medalist Herb Perez. You know these guys mean serious business, so there must be some legality to this game.

Ninja Reflex looks like a game people should at least check out, if not just for the fact that major martial arts experts are behind this game’s legality. Who knows — you could become a ninja master too, if you play it enough. Ninja Reflex is available in stores now — and if not, available within a couple of weeks — so check it out and see how well your ninja skills test against the competition. EA thinks this game is going to be a true innovator, but that’s up for the gamers to decide.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 7:15 pm and is filed under Other Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.