[quote name=\'MikeK\' post=\'205337\' date=\'Jan 1 2009, 08:32 PM\']
The XBox 360 has another game show title--
Merv Griffin's Crosswords. The cost is 800 Microsoft points/$10. Like the Wii game, there are over 1000 puzzles. Unlike the Wii game, there is an online multiplayer mode.[/quote]
I played the demo of this last night, so I might as well post my thoughts based on my experience.
The translation itself: Not bad. Relatively pretty, and an accurate rendering of the studio. LOVE that it has Chatpad support, although plucking letters off of an on-screen alphabet wasn't painful.
I think there are a grand total of four different body types, two male, two female, so by definition you'll see twins behind the podiums in every game, if you're playing a full game with Spoilers. They pretty much had Treadway record the bare minimum in terms of sound...the things he says get awfully repetitive after a short time. (But I just write that off as verite, just like I do in
NHL 09 when Gary Thorne mispronounces Milan Michalek and Ryane Clowe's names for the third year in a row.)
There is a mode where one or two players can play sans-Spoilers, which turns a horribly broken format into a mundane and random buzzer-battle. But at least the option is there.
The AI is pretty lame. Only once in the game I played did I see a plausible wrong answer given...most of the time it was either a blank stare, or it was the right answer with a couple of letters transposed. And the AI isn't that good, either, which is right in line with the show's contestant casting.
Some of the writing is pretty crappe: along the lines of "Place you play" for PLAYFIELD, which I consider dirty pool in cruciverbalism because it uses part of the answer in the clue; "Place you frolic" would be much better. But, again, I gave up on the actual show pretty early, and have no idea if this sort of writing was considered acceptable there.
Didn't get to see the bonus game, because I got sniped out of the podium I ran up $100K and two trips on (oh, the money system is a little inflated compared to the actual show; I didn't see a clue under $500, and several $3000 clues were in play), came back into the wrong one, and couldn't instabuzz my way out of it in time, and therefore eventually lost the match. But this isn't a shortcoming of the game itself, it's a shortcoming of the aforementioned horribly broken format. I might try a Spoiler-free game tonight before I delete it just to see what it looks like.
Anyhow, if you like
Merv Griffin's Crosswords, then I would say that $10 is probably a steal for this. Most of my problems with the game are with the awful format over the presentation, and the AI is basically a coin-toss anyhow ("Do I get it right or not?" *flip*), so the lack of creativity there doesn't kill me. But ultimately, for me, it's still
Crosswords, which I think is a poor game at its face, and so I'll pass.
