Brad's Game Reviews: Xbox LIVE Arcade Edition
I got cozy with Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) this weekend and pulled the trigger on a number of board-game adaptions, then proceeded to play the crap out of them. I'm hoping for more board/card game adaptions for XBLA in the future. Ticket to Ride, I'm looking at you.
I've played the board game several times with Beth. It is, in general, highly thought of as a "gateway" game that you can play with wives or family - easy to learn, quick to play with strategy if you're willing to think. Beth doesn't care much for it, however, so I figured the XBLA version would scratch the itch for me. So far that has proven to be true. In fact, I think I prefer the Xbox version to the real thing. It's easier to get going, easier to play and easier to score. The visuals are very nice for what it is, although the renaissance soundtrack grates after a dozen or so games.
On easy, I can thump the computer badly. The AI never bothers to play farmers, so it's easy to rack up huge scores. On medium, the AI will occasionally play a farmer, but it is still fairly easy to beat. I haven't bumped it up to the next setting yet so I don't know how hard it will get. I also don't have a gold account so I haven't played it online.
Bonus downloadable content includes 2 expansion packs: "The River II" and "King and Baron" (aka King and Scout). I'm not a huge fan of The River II - it doesn't do much for me over the original River expansion which is included with the base game. King and Baron is a nice twist but I wouldn't want to play with it every time.
The first German-style boardgame I played was Settlers of Catan back in the 90's. I haven't played the real thing in a while as it really requires more than 2 people and the folks we played with are now 45+ minutes away from us since we moved to Glendale. I've always enjoyed Catan, so I was looking forward to dusting off the cobwebs and playing it again.
The AI on easy is fairly easy and I had no trouble beating it. I won my first game on moderate, but I've lost a few here and there as well. On hard, I get trounced pretty consistently, enough to where I wonder if the AI is "cheating" by having perfect memory of my cards. One debate online is that because the cards you draw are trackable information, a player with an excellent memory can attempt to remember what you have in-hand. This leads to discussions on if players in Catan should always keep their cards face-up or not to eliminate that advantage.
The graphics and UI are average at best. The game is not going to win awards for presentation. There's an option to enable a 3D animated terrain, but IMHO it just makes the board more busy and distracting, and I have trouble seeing the pieces. I'm also not a fan of the character artwork style or the use of historical characters. I get that Big Huge Games has a history of Civ-type games to their credit and they're big, huge history buffs, but the notion of playing Catan against Caesar or Lincoln makes the experience slightly less exciting to me.
One thing that really annoys me is a flat-out bug: when you finish a game, you can pull up a screen with victory stats. On one of those screens, the text and UI are just completely busted, drawing on other characters and in the wrong spots. It's pretty sloppy and shoddy. It's remarkable that it hasn't been patched by now as XBLA has an excellent patching mechanism in place.
Those minor complaints aside, I really like Catan on XBLA and I'll be playing a lot more of it in the future.
The impetus for this recent spree of Xbox boardgaming was the release of Lost Cities on XBLA last week. Beth and I have played dozens, if not hundreds, of games of the original. It's an agonizing but addictive game that's great for 2. One bummer is that we can't play each other on XBLA unless we get 2 Xboxes and go through LIVE, but since we have the real thing here, that's hardly a major concern.
The graphics are adequate if somewhat tiny - they could have made better use of the screen space I think. Sounds are pretty good. I've unlocked various bits of artwork, but I'm not yet sure if that's anything to get excited about. The AI seems pretty good. I win most of the time on "normal" and soon I suppose I'll try hard or expert or whatever the next step is. Again, I have not tried online play but I suspect that'll work out well.
For $10, like the others, this seems like money well-spent. It's cheaper than the real game which makes it a good introduction or an easy way to practice.