Hasbro Family Game Night

Hasbro and EA’s video game adaptations of popular boardgames are now available to Nintendo DS owners. Whilst some maybe substantial enough to occupy a DS cartridge by themselves, others are more “bitesize”, and Family Game Night is a collection of the latter. Featuring Battleships, Connect 4, Bop It!, and Operation; is it really worth paying the RRP on this?

Out of the collection, I only played Connect 4 during my childhood years. I knew of the rules in Battleships, vaguely knew what you had to do in Operation, and never heard of Bop It!. So personally, the line-up of games doesn’t do it for me. I suppose it shows a nice range of boardgame genres, but then again, there’s only four games. Straight away, I smell EA and Bright Light Productions milking something.

Not only can you play the games with their original sets of rules, there’s also a variety of alternative rules, which gives these old classics a bit of freshness. For example, in Connect 4, you will have special pieces that behave in different ways (e.g. bombs will destroy any adjacent pieces). These new modes are okay, but I could do without them and would much prefer Family Game Night to have more than four boardgames.

There are unlockables, but whether they are worth unlocking is a question. I would say “they are not”. Score well in a game and you can unlock several backgrounds that you can play in front of. Achieving set “tasks” (e.g. beat a “genius” opponent in a game of Battleships) will unlock various collectables that you can’t interact with. So all in all, they’re pretty rubbish.

If you’re the sort of gamer that likes a game to keep a record of your statistics, then you’ll be disappointed too. There is an overall tally of the number of games you’ve won; but it doesn’t distinguish which were won playing what game. Obviously, the game is aimed at the casual demographic, but it just seems lazy to me.

The game does allow you to play against a friend, with the option to play together using the DS Download feature, or a “play and pass” method. Unfortunately, there’s no online modes; which I feel would have given this title more replay value. If we’re limited to just playing with people in the same room as us, would it not be better playing the real thing? The least they could have done was include online matches for some, if not all the games featured in this collection. These boardgames were not made to be played against Artificial Intelligence.

Bop It! is a game that tests your reaction time, and memory skills. As the game calls out what you have to trigger, it’s up to you to hit the correct part of the contraption quickly enough before the game’s over. For the most part, the touchscreen allows you to carry out the correct action, but there’s one  that’s hard to get right. This makes it a hindrance, and hard to enjoy the game. Having not played the “real version”, I’m guessing it’s more fun than this.

Same with Operation. The way in which you extract the objects from the patient has been modified in order to make use of the touchscreen/stylus method. This all feels very pointless, and a transparent attempt to cram as many (although four games is exactly “many”) games as they can into this compilation. Did no one at Bright Light Productions have the decency to say “I don’t think some of these will work”?

The only games I found to be any fun, were Connect 4, and Battleships. It’s such a shame that a good game of the former will be over in 2-3 minutes; and the latter was already included in Hasbro Compilation (Monopoly, Boggle, Yahtzee, and Battleships) which was released on the DS three years ago.

The inclusion of these two games aren”t enough to justify the game as a whole. The sound design is nothing special. The developers have kept things simple when it comes to sound effects; which draws parallels to the gameplay. Every time you make a move in Battleships, there’s this annoying fireworks-like noise that supposed to represent a missile. As someone who hates everything about fireworks, this is another reason for me to hate this game.

Family Game Night for the DS is one edition behind its Wii counterpart, and I guess Hasbro and EA thought DS gamers were missing out. Wrong. This collection of sub-standard games, if anything, proves DS gamers were missing out on very little.

Overall, this game is very disappointing. If only EA rerouted their efforts from all the waste-of-space releases, and focused on the decent games that they are capable of, reviewers like myself wouldn’t have to waste time on trash like this. What can I say? I’m getting tired of even talking about this compilation. With just four games in total; if you happen to not like any one of these, that’s a good 25% of Family Game Night you’re unlikely to touch. Another half-baked collection of games that tries to disguise itself as fun for the whole family. Get real.

+ If the line-up of games impresses you, I suppose…
+ May keep children occupied (no offense, kids)

- Only four games in this collection
- No online modes
- You’re unlikely to play for any substantial amount of time

Score – 3/10