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Jenga
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Graphics & Sound:
I think the various Lego games that we've had on consoles in recent years got something right. They figured that while people like building Legos, the lack of any tactile qualities in a videogame meant that people wouldn't want to literally build Legos in a game setting. From this was derived the simple but entertaining one-button build that has been featured in every Lego game. Playing Jenga is the inverse of building with Legos, being built around deconstruction. The Hasbro Family Game Night series has packed in quite a few classics, and Jenga is no exception. It stands among many straw, pipe, and block games as one of the few that can still be completely entertaining all these years later. The transition to a console left Jenga no worse for wear, and introduced some new features through its Remix mode that focus on pulling and placing blocks of a specific color. The distinctive "tock" sound of tapping and moving around wooden blocks was retained, but we can't shake the notion that Jenga has been emotionally denuded in some way by going virtual. Paint as pretty a picture as you like, but give me the feel of a wooden block in my hand.
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Gameplay:
If you've never played Jenga before, it is actually a bit hard to describe. Imagine a tower of blocks, constructed with straight rows laid out in alternating patterns. You build the tower first, in order to play Jenga. The gameplay beyond that point involves taking the tower apart, one block at a time. Making it more difficult is the requirement that you stack blocks you remove on the top of the tower, as a base for the next player's move. Lower blocks have to be tapped out aggressively and nudged in order to not topple the tower. Once the upper layers start to develop and the middle is eroded, the tower becomes mighty tippy, and when it topples you shout "Jenga" and that's that... If you're wondering where the fun part started, it really does make for a fun party game with a bunch of people. There's the constant opportunity to sabotage a friend, but only at the risk of putting yourself in a bad situation. Pulling the blocks here is every bit as precarious as in the real game, plus you have the Remix Mode that forces you to choose blocks of a specific color. In this way, you can't mess around with the easy blocks. Playing for points, you'll try in both modes to force one of the other people playing against you to pull off some impossible move and crash the party.
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Difficulty:
We especially liked Remix in this game, because it injects a substantial amount of luck into a game that might otherwise be imbalanced. Especially when you play with younger kids, start with Remix. The basic rules are the same, but savvy adults are forced to take some moves they might not otherwise, because of the color matching. Kids will also respond positively to the brightly colored towers! The real challenge in either mode is to pick the right block, and then to figure out the best way to extract it from the tower. Suspects aren't always obvious, as you'll find looser blocks hanging out at times at the bottom of the tower. Once you locate a loose block, the finessing begins. You can push and pull almost any block, but there are some patterns that define the game's default layout. Once a few blocks are pulled, it's anyone's best guess as to how the others will react to strong tugging. Thankfully, Jenga as a videogame still lets you move the tower around and sample any block you'd like with minimal commitment. Sure, you can fudge the tower by all that tapping and tugging, but it will only come back to haunt you in the end. We couldn't decide if placement of blocks on the top of the tower ended up being harder or easier than real life. Easier in the sense that you don't get shaky hands, but harder in the sense that you have to do a complicated maneuver with two buttons simultaneously to drop your blocks. You do get the hang of it, but controls are a weak point.
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Game Mechanics:
The camera controls in Jenga are actually pretty intuitive. You move up, down, and around the tower in a way that most of us have become accustomed to, through action games and anything in the FPS category. Really, you don't have to achieve pinpoint accuracy with the camera because there's a handy indicator showing exactly which block you'll be fooling with. The "glowing block" is a giveaway that the camera is really just adjusting to which block you've selected by moving the analog stick, something you learn the first time you try to move the camera without selecting another block. You can tap by pressing a button and watch the block respond... or not. If not, you've probably made a bad selection. We learned from experience that you can't really fix a bad move, and some blocks are so loose that what seems like a gentle tap will send them flying out of the other end, causing the game to end. If any of the tiles you've removed fall to the ground, it's Game Over. The controls sometimes cause this to happen accidentally in a way that doesn't reflect the real game. In real life, you're looking down on the tower almost all the time, where Jenga for XBox 360 puts you at more of a lateral viewing angle. From this perspective, it can be hard to tell that you're dropping a block slightly on top of another. You learn to snug the block down slowly and avoid this, but some unintentional errors will have you frustrated over the drop mechanic. This basically sums up the Jenga experience; it carries a lot of nostalgia and does a decent job translating the fun of dismantling a block tower, but fails to really transcend its medium and provide something new and improved. You'll enjoy Jenga so much in this version that you may go break your physical set out of the closet. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we're betting that not many players will be drawn to repeat sessions with this version of the franchise if they have a chance to play the "real" thing.
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-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock |
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