Gamer Reviews

As someone whose head is crammed full of useless knowledge, I have a soft spot for trivia games. There’s nothing quite like coming up with the title of an obscure film or the mating habits of a random species of seabird to inspire feelings of superiority over friends and family.

This week, Xbox Live Arcade gets its first downloadable trivia game, Wits and Wagers. Developed by Hidden Path Entertainment, Wits is a number-based trivia title that mixes the genre’s traditional elements with some new twists – namely poker-style betting and a unique, whimsical interface.

Wits & Wagers started as a board game, published by North Star Games and released nationwide in 2007. And, like most board games, it’s probably more fun to play in person than on a game console. The concept — that it’s fun to sit around with a few folks, either on the couch or online, and test your knowledge of arcane details — is sound. There’s even betting involved, which adds a layer of complexity to the simple rhythm of reading and guessing answers to a steady stream of questions.

Each player chooses a look for their on-screen character from a group of 50 faces. Up to six players can play at a time, either online or offline, and each will need to sign in with a profile. Once in the game, everyone is issued 5 betting chips and the questions start flying. How many letters are in the longest English word recognized by an Oxford dictionary? In what year did the New York Times Sunday edition run its first crossword puzzle? Participants then choose from a long list of numbers and lock in their answers.

Then the gamblin’ begins. Think you know your history? Bet on yourself. Know your weaknesses and your friend’s strengths? Put your chips on her answer to hedge your bets. When the correct answer is revealed, the player closest without going over wins some chips, and so do those who bet on that answer. The system allows players who aren’t all that knowledgeable about much of anything to do well by paying attention to the other players’ habits and patterns. And since the rounds are only seven questions long, one lucky hit/bet can put you so far ahead of your competition that it can be all but impossible for them to catch up.

Wits & Wagers is precisely what it advertises itself to be – a number-based multiplayer trivia party game. It’s interactive, well-produced, and easy to pick up and play. As Xbox Live’s first trivia game, it serves its purpose but stops short of being a complete success. The all-number format will appeal to some people, and not to others. I found it repetitive and a bit dull after a while, sort of like taking a standardized test in the guise of a game. The real fun of playing trivia games comes when you get an answer right. You may get close in Wits & Wagers, but it’s extremely rare.

I do like the fact that, unlike some other XBLA board/party games, Wits & Wagers is truly interactive. Choices you make are quickly visible to other players, who can then act on your choice. Wits supports the Big Button Pad controller that comes bundled with Scene It!, but I found it to be a poor substitute for the standard Xbox 360 controller. The big button, with its four clickable corners, is imprecise and makes scrolling through a list of numbers awkward when compared to an analog stick.

The Xbox Live Vision camera is also supported, showing your live feed to other players if turned on. On the plus side, this implementation can be used to curb cheating. On the minus side, it would have been nice to be able to snap my picture and paste it on my 2D dancing character. Yes, dancing. One of best bits of Wits & Wagers is the fact that you can use the right analog stick to make your avatar flail its arms and legs about during questions and answers. It’s a small addition, but one that made Wits & Wagers seem like more than the sum of its parts.
Closing Comments
If you like numbers – dates, weights, estimates, measures, etc. – then Wits & Wagers may be right up your alley. But as an overall trivia experience, it wears out its welcome fairly quickly. The betting is an interesting feature and it democratizes the game somewhat. And depending on your perspective, that can be either positive or negative. As the first of its kind on XBLA, Wits & Wagers works, but isn’t the party game we’ve been waiting for.

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Tags: Xbox 360 by Mikey
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Change your perception and make your own reality.

Typically when you play a puzzle game, you are given an objective and perhaps a few different ways that you can accomplish this task. However, you’re not frequently asked to readjust the reality of the world simply by manipulating the camera to close gaps between platforms. The same could be said about erasing pitfalls by changing a camera angle so a column appears to cover a hole. These optical illusions form the basis behind Sony’s latest PSN title, echochrome, which asks players to constantly tweak, bend and change their perceptions to solve deceptive puzzles. While the choice to use optical illusions is a unique one, the decision to focus upon a simple wireframe presentation adds a surprising amount of depth to this spatial puzzle title.

echochrome hosts an extremely basic presentation: a series of platforms are suspended in “mid-air” against a backdrop of pure white. Among those platforms is a wire frame figure which continually walks along the platform its on, as well as up to four shadowy “echoes” of that figure scattered across the rest of the stage. The goal of the puzzle is to start at one point with the wire frame figure, collect all of the echoes in any order that the player chooses, and return to the starting point before time runs out. That might sound relatively basic, until you realize that most of these platforms are separated by large gaps in space, riddled with holes that can make the figure fall, and jump pads that can propel the figure away from its intended path and in a new direction.

Fortunately, before you’re thrown into this potentially confusing situation, you’re placed into a tutorial that explains the five laws that govern the world of the game and how they can be applied: Perspective Travelling, Perspective Landing, Perspective Existence, Perspective Absence and Perspective Jump. These laws dictate exactly how the player can manipulate the camera and, by extension, the world, to solve the various levels that you play on. For instance, players can use the concept of Perspective Travelling by moving the camera to make distant platforms appear to be connected to one another. Similarly, players can swing the camera so that a piece of a platform blocks the obvious appearance of a gap, virtually “erasing” it with Perspective Existence. It may take some getting used to for some players, and some people might not be able to wrap their heads around these concepts, but it does open new dimensions for people to explore.

While these laws define the world, they provide an incredible amount of flexibility which you can discover after a little experimentation with the game and some of its provided tips. For example, it can be somewhat tricky at times to cleanly line up different platforms because of their relative distance. However, by using the Snap feature attached to the Square button, players can trigger Perspective Travelling rules on these structures and help you connect the two. Players can also hit the triangle button and stop the wire frame figure, giving them a chance to rearrange the environment without feeling as though the character will walk through a hole and fall off the screen. However, even if your figure starts plummeting towards the edge of the screen, a player can save them with some agile rotation of the camera (and the game world). This can even be sped up by holding down the R1 button, which can let you “catch” the figure on another section of the world. With enough practice, players can even use the jump pads and holes to propel or drop their characters from one section to a previously unreachable area.

o fully explore the world of echochrome, players are presented with three different modes: Freeform, Atelier and Canvas. By selecting Freeform, the computer will randomly select eight levels from the game’s standard set of 56 stages for players to test their perceptive skills with. You have a chance to influence the difficulty of the chosen puzzle by using the directional pad to select from one of five levels, which you do at your own peril — just kidding. If you make mistakes, you can always retry the stage, but if you happen to get in over your head, you aren’t forced to remain on that stage at all; the designers thoughtfully provided a skip feature that allows you to bypass that level and move on to the next brainteaser.

Some people might consider that to be something of a crutch that makes the game too easy, but I beg to differ: it makes the game much more accessible to those players who are intimidated by the perceptional adjustments you need to make to play the game. It also gives you a chance to get a sense of other stages randomly so you can work on your skills.

Now, if you’d rather work on conquering or beating each stage, the Atelier mode is for you. It’s broken into two different sections: Gallery and Portfolio. The Gallery visually displays all 56 stages and allows you to individually select one level and explore it, trying to complete it as quickly as possible to set your own level best. Alternatively, you can select an entire group of eight levels and try to set a course best. These courses are split up across seven levels from A to G (A being the easiest of the stages and G being the most complex), so players will automatically know just what kind of challenge they’re setting up for themselves.

By contrast, the Portfolio section displays stages that you personally create, whether that’s by modifying any one of the pre-existing stages or new creations from the Canvas Mode. Canvas mode is extremely flexible in that you’re provided one of six separate elements to help you build your level maps: basic cubes, stairways, echoes, the wire frame, jump blocks and blocks with holes. While you’re limited by some specific dimensions (38×38x38 boxes on the PS3), the construction of these stages is only constrained by your imagination, which means that you could conceivably make as many new levels as you want. Once you’ve finished these, you can test the viability of these stages to make sure that they can be solved, and title these stages before you upload them to the Sony servers or trade them with friends.

The PS3 version also has the added advantage in that you can download brand new levels from around the world, which will be randomly inserted into the Freeform mode as well. Because echochrome was released earlier this year, players in Hong Kong and Japan have had plenty of time to design their own stages thanks to the Canvas mode. The best ones were taken by the designers and immediately made available to players, which automatically boosts the number of levels that you initially get with the game. Some of these are really creative, such as a gigantic maze and a level that’s constructed only out of blocks that form the number three. What also makes them interesting is that if you run into a stage that you’re stumped on, you can skip it and it won’t count against the standard “eight level” Freeform mode setup. The one downside to these new levels, however, is that they’re solely available within the Freeform mode and can’t be accessed in the Atelier mode, so you can’t practice with them or guarantee that you’ll run into them when you choose the Freeform mode.

While I haven’t really pointed out the visuals because of their simplicity, there’s something to be said about the classic lines of the wire frame figure and the stages that it traverses in the game. It essentially highlights the fact that while the power and visual strength of this generation of consoles is impressive, engaging gameplay can be made easily and creatively with basic elements. What stands out more is the sound presentation for the game, which is truly excellent. A hauntingly melodic violin soundtrack continually plays across everything from menu screens to level creation and gameplay, which helps ease tension even as you rack your brain trying to solve a hard puzzle. Combined with simple sound effects and a pleasant female voice that provides soothing words of support as you play, echochrome is a pleasant aural experience.

Closing Comments
echochrome is one of those puzzle titles that doesn’t come along very often, but immediately strikes a chord for its unique gameplay and incredible depth. While its optical illusions and its challenge to a player’s perception of the world will potentially scare off some players, the flexibility of each level and the simplicity of its presentation is incredibly effective, and should appeal to anyone looking for a challenge. At $9.99, echochrome is a great value for PS3 owners, and shouldn’t be passed up.

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Tags: PlayStation 3, Puzzle Games by Mikey
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