I picked up the diminutive but impressive Xbox Live Vision Camera last week, receiving it as birthday present in the mail from my good friend TygerFyr. After plugging it in (properly), it lit up with a signature green ring of light around the lens and was immediately recognized by the 360. The dashboard effects alone (although more than three would be fabulous…) are funky and fun, not to mention the intense joy of "video Uno". A great value overall (even if I paid for it ; )
Somewhat disappointing was the lack of Totemball "out of the box". Even more disappointing was finally getting to play Totemball, though…
I launched the game to a super-rudimentary, ultra-no-frills menu for Totemball. (I DID love the little reggae jam that greeted me, though) I chose Start Game and dove right into the single player experience. My, what an experience.
There is a brief introduction that shows a waterfall on either side of the screen, with instructions to move the logs up and down in a some bastardized version of calibration. (We’ll come back to that in a minute). Upon entering the actual game, I was greeted by the most painful (both physically and mentally) gameplay I’ve experienced in a long while. (And yes, I’ve simmed 30 years of Madden 06) Waving my arms around like a cartoon, I could barely control (read: arbitrary tracking) the logs that serve as the control mechanism for the mentally-challenged "pturtle" that is your avatar for this interactive special school. Watching the logs flit up and down their respective waterfalls would make one think I was a cast member of a live-action Fist of the North Star. Rich figured out that we should turn the lamp on behind us to give the camera some more illumination to work with. This barely helped, although since the lamp was directly behind us, we were doing some pretty accurate Jesus poses as a bonus. Movement in this game (which seems to be your only real job in single player) was so impossible that on several occasions the game simply reset our position in the most parental of fashions: "It’s OK, Johnny, you’ll walk like the other boys soon."
Completely disgusted with this ordeal, we decided to check out the co-op mode, where the second player gets a controller and "juggles" the collected totems using the face buttons (we only got two, as simple forwards, backwards, and turning is as impossible as Theoretical Physics). Mind you, the POINT of this game is to collect these totems (‘ptotems"?), each of which add a "track" of music to your soundtrack. You can imagine my dismay, then, when a bug in the co-op mode rendered the entire round MUTE.
Microsoft, how do I put this mildly…fucking fix this piece of shit.
1. – A REAL calibration screen, one that gives you a rating of it’s understanding of the environment and the player, and a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for the overall experience of a camera game. This should, by all rights, be in the dashboard.
2. – Um…music in co-op? Yeah…that’d be nice.
This experience, on a scale of 1 to 10, is fucked.
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