2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa
PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, PC
It is tempting to complain about EA’s habit of releasing two or more iterations of its soccer games every year, forcing fans continually to shell out for updates. But EA’s soccer games are generally too good to miss, both in terms of superficial polish (this version, released for the World Cup, includes great animations of real-life managers on the sidelines) and gameplay mechanics, better than any other on offer right now.
Wii Fit
Nintendo Wii
On paper it shouldn’t have worked: give people an electronic board to stand on and make them do aerobics moves in their living room. But work it did, and Wii Fit — less a game, more an exercise guide — has been a huge hit since its release in 2008, adopted by institutions as varied as health clubs and military rehabilitation clinics.
Forza Motorsport 3
Xbox 360
A racing game of enormous scope, allowing you to burn around a dozen real-life tracks (plus more made-up ones) in everything from an Aston Martin to a Renault Twingo. Critics have praised its realistic physics: unlike games in which cars remain pristine from the beginning to the end of a race, Forza’s vehicles get the hell beaten out of them and show it.
Punch Out!!
Nintendo Wii
Gratuitous exclamation marks aside, this update of an 1980s arcade boxing game is excellent. Making perfect use of the Wii’s motion-sensor controls, players shadowbox in front of the screen, seeing their movements translated into uppercuts and jabs in the game. Tiring, but very, very fun.
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
Each week, whenever she has time off from her marketing job, Ida Jia can be found at Shanghai Disneyland queuing for hours to spend a few minutes with Linabell, a fluffy pink fox with big blue eyes. The 29-year-old does not go empty handed, bringing pink fox soft toys dressed in ornate custom-made outfits to show the life-sized character, as well as handmade presents as gifts. Linabell, which made its debut in Shanghai in 2021, is helping Disney benefit from a rapidly growing market in China for merchandise related to toys, games, comics and anime, which remained popular with teenagers and young
RSS