LGR - The Price Is Right 2010 Edition - PC Game Review

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAahhh!Game shows have always intrigued me.The idea of turning a game into a short burstof televised entertainment is just odd.Why do people enjoy watchingother people play a game?Why do we enjoy seeing other people win?Or lose.The idea of turning this passiveexperience into an interactive experiencethrough a video game is even more strange to me.It's no longer watching other people.You become the person playing the game.Winning the prizes.Except that the prizes are fake.So it just becomes more like any other game.The Price is Right 2010 by Ludia,published by Ubisoft, is the newest of these gamesturned game show turned video game.It only costs $20 on the PC.It also came out for the Wii and I think the DS.The last game show game that I played before thiswas the first Wheel of Fortune game on DOSand Jeopardy! on the Commodore 64,so it's been a while.So I was curious to see how far games showshad come in the past, I dunno, 20 years.After the game displays a disclaimersaying that prizes are not real,you are forced to create an avatar.You can give it a name, choose the gender,looks, clothing, the standard avatar stuff.Most of the items will need to be unlocked,so there's not much at first to choose from.The avatars themselves look...okay, I guess.Once you got that stuff out of the way,you can just go straight into the game.I'm only gonna cover the classic game show modebecause that's all I really care to play.And I'm too lazy to capture footage for the other modes.Seriously. I just don't wanna do it.I love the omnipresent retro musicthat The Price is Right has,and thankfully they kept it in the game.It's like it's 1966 all over again.I guess.I wasn't there.Interestingly there is no Bob Barker in thegame or even Drew Carey or anybody else.In fact, there's no host!There's nothing, just the narrator dude.I'm not even sure if he's thesame guy that's on the show.It kind of sounds like him, but...you know, it's not exactly.Essentially, the game is The Price is Right.I'll let the announcer dude explain.One wonderful thing about playing thison a PC is the ability to...get a little hint.For instance, the canoes here.And it looks like they cost about $1,400.So I'm going to guess $1,200 just to be safe.Oh my gosh. I won.First try.This chick...absolutely disturbed me.I swear I know a girl that acts and looks just like this.Blank stare,looking around like she's some lab experiment,clapping along to who knows what,probably because she's crazy.You can tell there's absolutelynothing going on behind thoseweird eyes of hers.The first time you play,every time the first time you play, in fact,you start out on the Golden Road.So if you just start the game,delete your profile and start back over,then you'll start back in the same exact spotand you can guess everything correct thefirst time without even looking at Google.This is my first time around here on this one,so I will indeed...check back with Google to see if I can maybe...take a guess, but it doesn't seem tohelp on these types of games becausethey could put in any number theywant in there, and it'll be close enough.Doesn't matter. This is The Price is Right,so you go straight on to the big wheel thing.I actually like how they did this.You have a little hand iconcursor that appears and you candrag it down quicker or whatever and...Yeah, it just works.I tried to spin it backwards, but it wouldn't let me.So that kinda...annoyed medue to the lack of realism.Somehow I got the ever-elusive 95my first time.So that's cool.I don't know if it's just being nice or what.Unfortunately, you do have to wait forthese other stupid, stupid charactersthat you haven't seen up until this pointto get done with their totals.You can't skip anything.I just think it's interesting that you can't skip this,but yet you can't watch theother players play their games.I would at least like that optionso maybe I could skip THEMif I wanted to or I could watch their games.I'd like to see some of the othermini-games that are in herewithout playing through them myself, necessarily.Speaking of options, there are nonein the Options menu.There is nothingbut an option forsound volume, music volume andsomething else, but it wasn't important.There's no graphics options except forfullscreen mode and windowed mode.So I just played it in windowed modebecause otherwise it goes into like 1024x768and I have,I dunno, a 24-inch widescreen monitor,so that looks stupid on mine.So I just put it in a window. It looks fine.If you win at the wheel thing,you'll go to the Showcase Showdown.These videos are absolutely painful.And the problem with it, too, is not onlyare they just classic Price is Right cheesy,they're so frickin' tiny.Like, they're hard to see!Especially on a high resolution monitor.This showcase sucks!I'll take the other one.Blah blah blah. It is what it is.It's a showcase. There's a car.Who'd have guessed?And it's a Chevy HHR.Now here's the problem with these videos:I don't know when they were recorded.They could have been fromany point in the last five years.So I guessed that maybe this was a 2007.And...I didn't know what kind of options the car had,so I, I overshot itbig time.And the rest of the game isjust that. It's, um...the same exact thing over and over.Really, single-player, it's not exactlythe most exhilarating experiencethat I have ever had.I mean, I guess it's like any of the other game shows.Jeopardys, the Wheel of Fortunesand Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?There's only so much to it,and if you're not winning real prizes,these games are pretty boring.That and you don't have the crowdthrowing up gang signs and stuff tryingto show you what the price should be.So you don't have that to look at.All you have is Google.The way some of the mini-games are done are pretty cool.Like, you know, hit the ball inthe golf hole and stuff like that'senormously easy compared tothe rigged traps that they haveand call games on the real show.And I imagine that the Wii version or the DS versionactually might be a little moreenjoyable because of the socialaspect that's possible there,and the touch controls and, you know,whatever else they throw intothose game systems these days.So, it all comes down to the question ofwhether or not the game's worth the $20.Well...as an interestingpiece of gaming history,maybe, if you like this kind of thing.It's actually pretty fun.I'm not sure if I like this kind of thing. It's just...weird.The whole concept of it,but I'm probably looking into it too far.I mean, why do we play any game for that matter?The Wii version I think is something like $40.It's absolutely not worth that.Of course, most of the Wii gamesthat I have played are not worth it.In fact, I can't think of any that I've playedthat I have paid for that have been worth it.Wii Sports, maybe, but thatcame with the frickin' system!Whatever, I'm not going on a Wii rant, so...The Price is Right 2010. Who knew itwould be around this long? Holy crap.\n"