The EA Hasbro division have been working on adaptations of the latter name's library of classic board games for a while now under their Family Game Night brand. A collection of such sundry offerings was released for the PS2 and Wii back in November. When it came time to get Microsoft in on the fun, the threesome decided to work on something a little more, shall we say, intimate.
Family Game Night will be coming to XBLA in the form of a complete "channel" within the online service. Players will have a virtual game room to store their purchased EA Hasbro games, which they will be able to customize with themes and furniture as well as display trophies representing their assorted accomplishments in the games. Once festooned with all manner of cack, players will be able to share their room with others on the service, enabling them to be mocked, heckled and ostracized for being such utter dorks that they would think anyone else might give a rat's ass.
On title alone, the games they have announced as coming this Spring aren't anything to get jazzed about. Yahtzee, Sorry!, Boggle, Battleship and Connect Four have never been games that I thought demanded an appearance on a console, but EA Hasbro is promising that there will be new gameplay modes to put a bit of a twist on these relics.
Hopefully, I'll get a chance to look them over at CES this week and give some impressions. Since I love board games (not so much Hasbro, because they are the worst kind of corporate whores) and want them to be more popular, I really want this to be explosive but to hope for a happy ending at this point would be premature.
Contest:
11:20 AM on 01.06.2009
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Also, let's get Clue on XBLA arcade!
Also, I put together your italicized words Conrad.
Family Game Night, intimate, explosive, premature, happy ending.
Seriously buddy, you need to talk about something?
Also, board games in digital form suck. What good is playing strip Battleship over the internet?
Also, I love your use of italics, makes me feel all slanty, mmmm.
I mean, I love playing my board games in person with my weekly group and I wouldn't trade that for anything. But I'm lucky to have such a group. A lot of folks who love board games can't get a group of people physically together to play them and these are great solutions for them. Plus, no clean-up involved!
We need more things like Carcassone (XBLA) and Blokus (which is free to play online and an absolutely fantastic game) to show up as game adaptations, if only to give them a little more exposure and allow people to play with each other when they live long distances away, like with college students, etc. Qwirkle, Fluxx, and Munchkin are some games I'd like to see go online.
@Ben PerLee: I'd agree with you on Apples to Apples, except that seems like it would lose a lot in the transition, that game requires a lot of communication.