(Disclaimer: Amazon Affiliate links included where possible and I deem them relevant. I’ll earn a small commission, as described in my privacy policy from eligible purchases made through these links.)

Yet another new plan.

Instead of randomizing everything, I think I may want to do Ring Fit Adventure’s Adventure mode as my first workout every week (for the purpose of making sure I get another level in–though since these levels tend to last longer than most other workouts that also means making sure I get a workout of a decent length in even if/when my tendency towards procrastination results in doing nothing else)… which means I’ll need to take it off of my randomizer spreadsheet.

I’d still leave other RFA options on the randomizer, Rhythm Mode, mini-games, whatever else happens to exist, and I’d still try to get back into the habit (or start the habit, however the case may be) of the “one workout from every system every week” random element (which means doing those mini-games etc in addition to doing a level of Adventure Mode), this would be the only specifically chosen workout.

Of course, for that change to mean anything, I’ll need to stop procrastinating so I’ll have workouts to record….

On the flip side, I tested something with RFA during the week. Now that I finally have enough Joy Cons for every family member to pick a set to use and never need to share, I wanted to find out more about Ring Fit’s Multitask Mode. Specifically, that 500-point-per-day limit.

Either I’ve been using the wrong search terms or that limit doesn’t have a whole lot of detail available online. Is the limit per user account? Per set of Joy Cons? Per copy of the game? If I do my 500 points in a day, will that prevent anyone else from getting multitask points the same day?

The first and most obvious answer is that it will prevent anyone from getting points at the same time as me… no need to test that, you need the actual Ring Con to earn points so short of ordering a knock-off for the purpose the only way for multiple people to earn Multitask points is to pass the Ring around.

Next step was to see if I could get more points on a second set of Joy Cons after earning the full 500 on the first set. Turns out the Ring itself “knows” how many points I’ve earned–once I earn that 500, it refuses to let me earn any more no matter what Joy Cons I insert, until I’ve gotten onto the game to redeem those 500 points. (Also, I could earn those points on one set of Joy Cons, pop in a new set, immediately start up the game, and redeem them; which Joy Con is attached to the Ring makes no difference.) Which means if my parents choose to give the game a try one of us would need to redeem our points before passing around the Ring… but since the Ring retains that information, there is no need to swap out Joy Cons for the purpose unless the particular user wants to.

And finally, since I can get more points than the 500 limit provided I’ve redeemed them before continuing, the next test was to see if I can actually redeem more than that on a single profile. (Not that I planned to do this on the regular–can’t really consider it “cheating” since I still have to do the same exercise to get the points, but since the idea was to see if this would affect my parents’ ability to play it’d be better if I share those points). And that would be a “no.”

The game flags any profile that has earned 500 points in the span of the day as unable to add more, and I don’t have the paid subscription that gives me access to the various online features like the ability to gift them to a distant friend, so the test required me to add them to one of my parents’ profiles… which required convincing my dad to play through a level to create that profile, walking him through it when it looked like he couldn’t figure out what to do (your typical “I’m too old to understand computers even though the instructions are staring me in the face” spiel, despite having the same computer degree as me and having recently retired from a job that required regular computer use and therefore having more such experience than me who grew up on computers) until the game had progressed enough for me to add those points.

Now here’s hoping I can convince my parents to do more than “try” the game. The only thing they play on the Wii U is Wii Fit, so while I do have some motorcycle-themed games they might like (Mario Kart, which I bought solely because I can play as Link on a motorcycle, and Trials Rising) I kinda thought they might be interested in Ring Fit if I can persuade them to play anything at all.

On a vaguely-related note, Beat Saber has a new DLC pack out, so at some point I’ll need to check out those songs to see if there’s anything my sensory-disordered brain likes enough to pay for…. (I recognize more than few, which has been rare given my limited taste in music, but that never means much from a purchasing perspective.)

I did, miraculously, manage to get in missions through Zombies Run and The Walk every day this week, finishing out the Atlantis mission, nearly finishing Negative Space (one running episode to go!) and finding out how well The Walk works as a “exercise right before bed” alternative to all of the Homefront-esque (more formally known as “bodyweight exercise”) missions that I have now completed.

As alluded to in the previous post, I rather expected getting distracted by social media when I got home from work to be the biggest risk of delaying completion of the Negative Space storyline, but it turns out that one of the running missions carried that risk–on Thursday we went for a motorcycle ride and out to dinner during the time when I would normally have done my daily walk, and by the time we got home it was about half an hour away from sunset. Now, I have a reflective vest to make myself more visible for safety reasons, originally bought during the winter when the weather itself would impair that visibility, but I prefer not to go out for walks when the sun is down regardless; while I had time to do another mission, it was a close thing.

Also, I don’t like Negative Space. I still have one episode to go in which it has a chance to redeem itself, but the way episode four ended (I could deal with the first three without outright “not liking” the story) makes that highly unlikely. To avoid further spoilers, I’ll just say you have to play the story (after having gotten invested in Zombies Run itself) to see why…. though the descriptions of each episode kind of give away part of my reason. And I rather suspect there are a few other New Adventures that I might not like for the same reason.

The Walk is… iffy. The original plan, given the slim possibility that that plan would work, was to do an episode every night when I got home from work the way I’d been doing the Homefront workouts, but even starting off I found problems.

For starters, unlike the running missions in Zombies Run (which you can track via distance, step count, or time-based), the literal storyline of The Walk is purely time-based… but it still needs to detect that you are moving. First problem this represents is that I couldn’t simply leave my phone plugged in and charging while I was going through the story; I had to have it on me the entire time.

Second problem is the gameplay element, all of those landmarks to scan as I pass them, provided if I’m within range; if I pass by too far without tapping a relevant spot it disappears and I’ve lost my chance to collect it until I repeat that episode. Which means I need to be able to watch the screen.

For the first episode I dealt with that second problem by alternating between keeping the phone in my pocket and pulling it out to check the screen, mostly relying on the audio clips to judge if I’ve gone far enough to need to look (and occasionally pulling it out between clips when I knew a lot of time would pass between them).

For the second episode I decided to see if it would work on the exercise bike, fitting the phone into the included tablet mount for the purpose so I could watch the screen, knowing full well that the FAQs page says it would be less accurate this way than simply walking. Well, that bike must be too sturdy because I spent several minutes riding and the icon on the screen never budged to show I was moving. So back to pacing in my room it was.

Third problem is the sheer length of the missions. All of the Homefront missions lasted roughly half an hour which, as long as I didn’t get distracted by social media, was a decent amount of time for working out before bed when I don’t get home until nearly midnight (and don’t have to leave again until afternoon). But you can see from those screenshots that it took me nearly an hour to complete each of these two episodes; that’s doing the longer routes for these two, but some of the later episodes last an hour or more for the short routes.

Since this app has different “achievements” pertaining to completing the missions in a given timeframe (one for finishing without more than three hours of inactivity and another for finishing within 24 hours) I kinda thought I might be able to split up the longer missions… do half an hour one night, another half hour the next, and so on until an episode is done (doing the longer routes first so as to collect everything I can the first time around), and then simply do the short version of that same mission sometime while going about my day to get those achievements. But having not tested that yet, I’m not entirely sure that will work. See, when I went to start the second episode it told me a mission was already in progress (even though I’ve completed the first episode and should not have had anything “in progress”); this would seem to imply that splitting it up the way I want is actually an option. But when I tried to exit an in-progress mission, I would get a warning that I would lose my progress, which would clearly imply that splitting up the episodes that way is not an option.

Fourth problem? Unlike Zombies Run, The Walk has no music option. You can play music on another app, but there is no “pause the music when dialogue is playing” feature. If, like me, you prefer to have the audio clips auto-play when you unlock them (something I’m doing the first time I play each episode, but won’t do the second go-around if the previously mentioned plan works as planned because I’ll likely be listening to Zombies Run for part of it) you’ll want to make sure the volume is set so you can hear the story over your music. And if you don’t have music playing in the background… prepare for a lot of silence between audio clips.

Oh, but there is one thing I got wrong in an older post (took a bit of work tracking down which post), something that isn’t the problem I expected it to be: you can choose which route you want at any point before actually reaching the fork in the road, and the app will continue moving along whatever choice you’ve made. It won’t just sit at that fork waiting for you to make that choice, so battery life depending, I could (in theory) start a mission once I clock in for the day at work and expect most of even the longer missions to be done by the time I go to my first break.

Suggested products in use, Amazon Affiliate links included where possible:

• Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch