The latest of Ubisoft's lifestyle games aims to help you to kick the habit.
Not content with helping people to lose weight in 'My Weight Loss Coach' or offering tips on how to improve our lives in 'My Life Coach', Ubisoft has added a third title to its line-up of lifestyle games.From the annual Ubidays event, currently in full swing in the centre of Paris, comes the news of a new game for Nintendo DS aimed at helping smokers quit their habit.
Allen Carr's (not the camp comedian) Easyway to Stop Smoking is named after the multi-million selling author who has helped many people give up smoking through his techniques - he claims to have cured an estimated 10 million smokers in 40 countries.
Carr believes that the 'public smoking ban' has been essential to protect worker’s health from the effects of passive smoking, but it simply was not going to have the desired impact on smoking levels. "To do that, smokers need to be treated with respect and provided with an effective means of stopping smoking as an alternative to the failing NHS Stop Smoking Service," explains the author.
Such comments haven't gone down too well with the NHS who have refused to meet with Allen Carr to discuss the benefit of his methods. Nevertheless, Carr has pressed on with his world-wide campaign and believes that this game could help many people.
There's very few details as to what the game entails but we do know that it will begin with setting up a profile and entering details, such as how many cigarettes you smoke a day and' will feature fifteen mini-games help to "dispel the illusions about nicotine addiction" as players track their progress in kicking the habit using the "Path to Freedom" meter.
Once you've quit your dirty habit "you can still play the game and measure the daily benefits you get from your new life without cigarettes," Ubisoft explains.
"The player experiences a truly interactive engagement with the game, through which he or she learns that it can actually be enjoyable to quit smoking," said Christian Salomon, vice president of worldwide licensing at Ubisoft.
If Carrs' books have really achieved what he says they have, then the DS version could be a phenomenal success. The game will essentially bring his book to life.
