Pumping Irony

Microsoft’s 1 vs. 100 has been in beta for a little bit now but it seems they’re always testing on a Friday or Saturday. I don’t have the kind of seniority (or luck) to get Fridays or weekends off so I jumped on the opportunity when I saw a 30-minute test of Extended Play mode scheduled from 7:30pm to 8:00pm EDT last night.

Apparently the game is setup just like the television game show (I had no idea there was such a thing until Googling afterward) where one player is selected to be the One and one hundred other players are selected to be The MOB (Mass of Bodies – if I’m getting this right?). Everyone else who joins is part of The Crowd but still gets to play along.

The Extended Play mode is where there is no One and no Crowd; everyone is part of a huge Mob. Extended Play will have nightly games, and are fully automated, whereas the normal shows are live events hosted by Chris Cashman.

This being my first time in 1 vs. 100 I took my time reading all the notes as I learned to play then joined the game. Apparently 1 vs. 100 can hold up to 200,000 players!

Last night’s session was four rounds of ten questions. After each ten questions there’s a brief intermission where you can browse that game’s statistics while some of them are shown on a monitor along with some short advertisements. Hey, it’s freely available (as far as I know) so they have to earn money somehow. Overall, the breaks were welcome because each round gets a little more intense as the game progresses. The ads seemed pretty short and I think there was only one commercial per break, everything else was either 1 vs. 100 or XBL-related.

One of the screens during the break is interesting – it shows how many players got correct answers during that round. With that information, I can say that last night there were over 37,502 players because that’s the highest number who got correct answers in one of the rounds!

I did notice that once in the game, I was auto-grouped with three other players. If the normal XBL VOIP channel was on, the others weren’t using it, and since we’re competing (or in Extended Play, are we?) I’m not sure I’d want VOIP on anyway. It was nice to be able to see how quickly they were answering the questions while it was being asked, which combined with the rather quick timer, probably adds an additional psychological factor to the intensity. Once the time is up, we can see the answer everyone chose while the host shows us the correct answer. I suspect the reason we’re grouped is so that we can at least get a little bit of sense that this is all happening live and there are other real people behind all the nameless avatars in the studio, because otherwise it could probably seem like you’re playing an offline single-player game like Scene It.

All in all, I have to say 1 vs. 100 was a very fun game. It’s easy to play, pretty casual in nature but it starts feeling fast and furious as the questions get more difficult, and being grouped with three other players gives a sense of live competition. Unlike a single-player game, such as Scene It, where eventually you would memorize the finite number of questions, for 1 vs. 100 Microsoft has a team of writers for each individual episode of the season. The timer is slow enough to let you read each answer and think (quickly!) about the answer but it’s probably too fast to be web searching for the answers.

From what I’ve read, 1 vs. 100 will be free for Gold members but even Silver members can play if there’s a Gold account on that console as well! So if I (Gold) play, my girlfriend (Silver) can join me on the couch and play along online! She’s never really gamed before, and she’s intimidated by all the buttons and controls on the 360 controller but I think she can deal with a total of four buttons. I think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 10:17 am and is filed under Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.