Has a thread started up yet? In any event Chris Bogart did
a post reviewing the home game that got buried somewhere else, so I thought I'd bring attention to that and post my own musings.
If any of this is old news to you by reading golden-road.net or anything my apologies. Basically, a number of participants bid (the rules suggest writing them down, but we go for the one-at-a-time TV style) and the winner takes on the remote for their pricing game.
The 12 included are: Cliff Hangers, Danger Price, Five Price Tags, Golden Road, Grand Game, Lucky Seven, Most Expensive, Pass the Buck, Plinko, Push Over, Safe Crackers & Shell Game. While I haven't demo'd all of them, I did find they were well designed and fun to play. Golden Road for example uses stacks right from the show. Cliff Hangers gives your options instead of an open dialog box, but it covers a decent range of prices, and is reasonable if you're not "bids $200 on a can opener" guy.
The graphics are of course stellar...well done, crisp adaptations of the games and set. I could drone on about what's not accurate and stuff, but that's superfluous to the enjoyment.
The Big Wheel here serves as more of a utility in that you press enter and it provides you a random animation of the wheel spinning and hitting a result. It does add up scores, but does not keep track or limit you to a game for three people. It takes away a tad when you have no control over the result, but it serves its purpose, and I guess that's okay.
The prizes are done as such: a still is provided from the show and its corresponding copy. You hear a bevy of announcers and music here...from Rich to Rod to Daniel to Randy and a few others I'm not familiar enough with to identify. Again, you can complain you're playing Danger Price with prizes clearly featured in Credit Card or whatever, but it's obviously miles ahead of showing you a crude black and white drawing or no picture at all.
The biggest gripe for me lies with the showcase. The huge plus is that they're taken from the episodes, and that they went the extra mile to put in a few extra pictures of each prize, so that the presentations have more life. But why is this multiple choice? There are six choices for each showcase bid covering a range of prices, but considering the game only uses this to tell you who won in the end (not telling you the differences or anything) why can't we just write it down and have the right guy/gal celebrate with the game's music and SFX? If Trivial Pursuit: DVD and Scene It can settle for a generic "you win" montage at the end of the game, why couldn't TPIR?
At the very least, I'll just be writing down my own bids and forgetting the DVD there. But if you're not so involved in the fandom that them using the wrong music cue bothers you, then you'll agree with me this is the best TPIR home option thus far, and a definite buy if you like party games. I can say this: more people walking by at a party will wanna jump in on this rather than the box game or PC game...
-Jason
