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Hasbro Family Game Night

by Steven Rodriguez - August 26, 2008, 8:45 am EDT
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The idea of bringing board games to the video game space makes sense when it's done like this.

Though video games have been starting to take over as a major source of home entertainment, they are still no replacement for a good, old-fashioned family get together around a classic board game. Electronic Arts figures that the best way to capture that feeling (and make money off of it) is to bring a bunch of classic Hasbro-branded games together and put them all in a single Wii video game. The result looks like it will be a very well-produced, slick way to play the classics.

Hasbro Family Game Night will feature six board games: Sorry!, Battleship, Boggle, Connect Four, Yahtzee, and Sorry! Sliders. These games are pretty much carbon-copies of their real-world counterparts, but with the obvious advantages of having the console keep track of scores and having nothing to set up or put away when you're done. (In fact, selecting a game from the main menu will open up the box for that game, set everything up, and then put everything neatly in its place when finished before returning to its virtual shelf.) Additionally, each game will allow you to customize popular house rules and alternate game modes to keep the games fresh each time you play.

One of the games I got to try out was Battleship. The version in Hasbro Family Game Night was in full 3D, complete with a water-logged board, perfect for placing your five ships. The game I played against another person had salvo rules activated, meaning I could fire as many shots per round as I had ships remaining. The outcome of that game isn't important (I won, of course!) but I got a really good idea that this rendition had a lot of neat details put in. The boards of the two competing players are placed back-to-back, just like they would be in an actual game, and between turns the camera swoops around to the other board. Ship pieces are hidden from view to both players once they've been placed to prevent peeking. By pointing the Wii Remote at the upper portion of your board, you can select which squares to target and fire away. The squares were a little small to easily select where you wanted to shoot, and there was no option to undo an errant choice. Still, the game was fun and the presentation was very nice.

Another game I got to try out was Sorry! Sliders, a new game that Hasbro will be releasing later this year. It's related to the classic Sorry! game in name and pieces only, as this game is more akin to the Olympic sport of curling than anything else. There's a spinning scoring zone in the center of the game board. The Wii Remote is used to "bowl" a Sorry! game piece from the outer edge of the board (the actual board game will have small ball bearings on the bottom of the pieces) as close to the center as possible. Play rotates between up to four players, and the idea is to knock pieces out of the scoring area. The weight of the pieces when throwing them toward the center felt quite realistic, and as long as four players can get together and a lot of pieces get thrown around, the game looks as if it would be good fun.

All the games I played in Hasbro Family Game Night were fun. Even Connect Four, which has an option to play continuously in a set time limit and to use special chips that affect the game board in some way, like blocking a column or pushing out all pieces underneath it. The concept of taking these classic board games and spicing them up in ways that only a video game can is a very good idea, and if the price is right then getting six board games for the price of two or three might be a deal too good to pass up, particularly for the kind of new audience the Wii is attracting these days.

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Genre Party/Parlor
Developer Electronic Arts

Worldwide Releases

na: Hasbro Family Game Night
Release Nov 11, 2008
PublisherElectronic Arts
RatingEveryone
aus: Hasbro Family Game Night
Release Nov 20, 2008
PublisherElectronic Arts
RatingGeneral
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