I Almost Threw Up Playing Nintendo’s Free Jump Rope Challenge on the Switch

Nintendo released a free game for all Switch owners today, called Jump Rope Challenge. Simply enough, the game challenges you to mimic jumping rope every day.

There’s no actual rope, so instead you just hold one Joy-Con in each hand and move your arms like you would if you were actually jumping rope, as an adorable jumping bunny counts how many jumps you’ve made. You can give that rabbit different outfits to work out in, and you can also play co-op where each person holds one Joy-Con. It’s extremely simple, but also elegant.

For “research purposes,” I decided to see how many jumps I could get in the game, stupidly wanting to test if it would let me go past a thousand. “I got to 100 and I’m not that tired,” the idiot (aka me) thought, forgetting he had asthma and was not exactly in great shape. “How bad could 900 more possibly be?”

I don’t know how bad 900 more could be, because by the time I got to 432 jumps at three and a half minutes in, I was clutching my chest as I retched over the toilet, convinced I was about to lose my breakfast.

I ended up recovering around 15 minutes later without doing so, but I cannot stress enough how this has nothing to do with Nintendo’s design and everything to do with this intern’s seeming inability to listen to his own body.

In plain text on the game’s download page, the description reads, “If you experience excessive fatigue, shortness of breath, chest tightness, dizziness, discomfort or pain while playing STOP USE IMMEDIATELY.” But guess who experienced excessive fatigue, shortness of breath, chest tightness and discomfort, yet didn’t stop? If you guessed the dipshit writing this article, you’d be right.

A small team of developers at Nintendo made the game after Japan’s stay-at-home orders were put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic “to add some quick and fun movement into their daily lives,” according to a press release. The company released a full-fledged fitness game, Ring Fit Adventure, in 2019, and that game similarly kicked my butt due to my unwillingness to pace myself. For those who can’t find or afford the game, however, this is a nice alternative. Just, um, remember to pace yourself.