Trivial Pursuit Review

admin — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 06:59:52 +0000

You may or may not know this, but the editorial team of TeamXbox (or half of us, anyway) share a floor in an office building in the scenic San Francisco Bay Area with the editorial teams of IGN and Gamespy. Corporate relationships aside, friendships naturally develop across the aisles, and I’ve been lucky enough to develop a regular habit of Tuesday night pub trivia with a couple of the guys. The core group is myself, and erstwhile TXBers Nate Ahearn and Will Tuttle, plus an assortment of non-industry friends who all go out and drink beers and answer trivia questions in the hopes of winning a measly $30 bar tab. Why do we do it? Well, we love beer, this is understood, but we also love trivia and the fun camaraderie it inspires in groups of grown individuals arguing the subtle differences between ‘N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. It must be a matter of age. I’m of a certain generation who grew up with videogames that I shared with friends of my own age group, but who also experienced games of a different sort with my family. Namely board games, and silly pencil and paper games my parents and their friends would play when they were blitzed like Categories and Initials. I wont go into those, because Trivial Pursuit reigned supreme, and it was the game that I, an underage upstart would even be invited to play. Now we’ve come full circle, and the classic Trivial Pursuit board game that has seen so many half-hearted attempts at being converted into a video game institution is back for one more try, on the latest and most fully-featured console hardware available. How does it do, and is it enough of an experience to make me stay at home on Tuesday night, invite the homies over and get our trivia on? If that’s was the way you are going to play it, yes. EA has been very clear in their intention to make the multiplayer experience of this game be focused on the “one couch” paradigm. That means no support for multiplayer over Xbox Live, a choice that will probably turn some gamers off. Online multiplayer is such a standard for games right now that it’s a little baffling that EA wouldn’t include it. But they didn’t, and ultimately the absence hurts the experience. The two multiplayer modes are well designed, and would work well online, thought they do work well in their own right. In addition to the classic mode, which plays very much like the traditional board game, there is a mode called Facts and Friends which adds interesting twists to the gameplay. All of the players share a puck, and there is wagering and power-ups involved. For really competitive types this mode can be really fun and challenging, but it’s probably going to be a bit too complex to play with the whole family after Thanksgiving dinner. Thankfully the most satisfying mode is the single player one called Clear the Board. This is a straight up personal challenge to either achieve the highest possible score by building up multipliers or race through the wedges in the shortest time possible. To accomplish either of those goals, and work your way to the top of the online leaderboards, will take some surprisingly crafty strategies. It’s not just about getting the questions right. Which brings us to the core of the game, how’s the trivia? The quality of the questions is pretty decent, and should be accessible to a broad range of players. There’s a few too many questions about obscure fantasy and sci-fi books in the Arts and Literature category for my tastes, but maybe EA was just trying to target them more towards the gamer/nerd/geek populace. My problem is not with the questions, but more with how they are asked. There are a number of question types available in Trivial Pursuit, but some small inherent problems in them will frustrate you. It’s easy to understand why you would make most of the questions multiple choice: there’s no way to yell the answer at your Xbox 360 and have it understand you, and even if you answered that way you would have to use the honor system to let the game know id you answered correctly or not. Thankfully, the multiple choice options don’t get too cutesy like Who Wants to be a Millionaire or anything, making it easier to guess. The image based questions definitely mix up the action in a welcome way, but the design of them creates too many opportunities to fail, even when you know the correct answer. Some of the images are too lo-res to fully make out the visual clues you need. This is particularly troublesome on the map questions, which make you choose big dots marking locations, often very close to each other. It would have been a lot easier and a lot less confusing if state and or country borders were drawn on the maps to give you more reference. Question-wise, the only other real problem is that they’ve already started repeating on me. A lot. Playing Clear the Board for the fourth or fifth time, I’ve probably seen about half the questions already. There will be new question packs made available for download (and for a fee) that should extend the gameplay, but I’m a little disappointed that there aren’t more in the base game. Playing the real life board game, you could play ten games in a row and never see the same questions. Especially not that “Moops” one. The first downloadable pack is free though, and adds a good number of movie based questions to the mix. Trivial Pursuit on the Xbox 360 is a pretty well-made digital adaptation of a board game classic. But its flaws are also rather glaring, especially the lack of online play. EA also needs to give out an extra pack of questions for free if they really want to do right by those who shelled out their money for the full release. Otherwise, we’ll have to skip it and go to pub trivia. At least they have Guinness.

Source: TeamXbox

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Trivial Pursuit Review