Despite having cashed in my xbox and xbox360 in the last 12 months, cleansing myself of a stack of videogames (mostly donated by my then-benevolent employer), I’m really getting into this new game. The killer thing about this one is the way the game is played: you get one life, and a health meter. The goal is to get your health meter as high as possible. As you progress, your health meter goes up or down depending on what you do, along with a bunch of stats about your body.

There’s no heads up display, so in order to figure out all your stats, you need to find a variety of pieces of equipment (scales, heart rate monitors, consulting other players, even using your emotions to guage general well-being). You accept missions on a day-to-day basis, and any mission can either harm you or help you. There are no bosses.

There’s a site you can log in to compare your mission stats with other players of the game, although the game itself is more-or-less one player only. All other in-game characters are on their own missions and can only provide advice or information (not always accurate).

Yesterday I accepted a mission that was supposed to boost my health meter, which involved running for roughly 2 miles (3.5km) in about 30 minutes. Something that’s totally do-able, even at my current level of fitness. Ideally, 2 miles should be a roughly 15-minute mission.

It was about 0.8km from my destination that things started to go slightly wrong. I had obtained climate information from a widget that merely indicated overcast, 10°C weather. Apparently either my internet connection or the widget was experiencing some kind of lag, because at about the 7 minute mark into my mission, I started to notice a few drops of rain.

“Run faster,” I thought to myself. “Nothing like a little cool breeze and the threat of rain to get you hussling. Running keeps you warm.”

I was at roughly the 2km mark when the mission went south. The sky grew dark, thunder started rolling in, and just as I hit the center of Hyde Park, it started HAILING. By the time I had made it to Knightsbridge, the hail had abated and SNOW took it’s place.

End result: my fastest pace on a mission yet, 8′22″/km. Still far from where I’d like to be, but the mission was a success. Three out of 8 runs completed (with 17 days left), and 1 out of 5 runs under the average pace of 9′03″ a month (with 26 days left).

The Nike+ kit was the best £19 ever spent, and this is the state of the art of Mixed Reality.