Xbox “Night at the Movies” 0
Is Xbox Live positioning itself to become the next Showtime?
By Jeremy Azevedo
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Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Xbox “Night at the Movies” event at the Zune House in Hollywood. I showed up a little early so that I would have time to mess around with the two new casual party games that were being featured that night, “You’re in the Movies” and “Scene-It”. |
We began with a few rounds of “You’re in the Movies”, which tasks you with playing mini games in front of a small camera, similarly to Sony’s “EyeToy”. It feels kind of like the home version of that old Nickelodeon game show, “Nick Arcade”, where kids pretended to be in a video game, jumping over pterodactyls and stuff in front of a green screen to win prizes. The game was pretty fun, especially with lots of people… but what really made it great was that, at the end of the game, all the footage from the various mini games is cut and pasted into a short film that makes comical usage of all the movements made in the previous events. The end result was never short of hilarious, and I could really see this being the sort of thing that finally cuts into the Wii’s stranglehold on the casual market. The only thing more fun than playing and watching other people play this game was watching the demonstrators feign manic enthusiasm, non-stop, for like four hours straight. Great job, smiling guy!
Do you think anyone will refer to it as “Urine the Movies”?
A couple of delicious scotch and sodas later, we played “Scene-It”, which I quite honestly didn’t expect to be all that different than the DVD board game I’d already played a million times. And yet I was wrong. Before long, my guest and I were jumping and flailing our excellently designed, game show-like remotes around, trash talking and mocking one another to such widely disparate films as “The Brady Bunch Movie” and “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”. The game even allows other contestants to drop in and out at will, a very nice feature for longer games. I was impressed by the inclusion of some very cultish stuff, mixed in with the more modern, mainstream films. This version was an excellent mix of movie trivia, and a fun new approach to another classic party game. Read the rest of this entry →
